100 Snowmen by Jennifer Arena
The 100th Day of School by Angela Shelf Madearis
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr.
Curious George Makes Pancakes by HA & Margret Rey
The color of the week: brown was a lot of fun to explore. We talked about things that are the color brown and went on a hunt around our classroom to find things that are brown.
We sang "Three Brown Bears" to the tune of Three Blind Mice.
"Three brown bears, three brown bears.
See all their beds, see all their chairs.
The Mommy cooks in a big brown pot,
The Daddy's porridge was much too hot,
The Baby Bear always cries a lot,
Three Brown Bears"
For the number of the week:13 we started off by counting to and backward from thirteen. They love doing this every day and when we get to the end of counting backward, they all scream blast off!! ;) The kids also practiced writing the number and word for thirteen.
When I started in my class, I found a page like this from education.com, so I made my own for the number 13. The children have to practice writing the number and then color in that number of squares. It's a great way to introduce graphing and helps them to work on their one-to-one correspondence.
For our theme "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom", I have to be honest, that we really did not do a lot with it this year. In years past I have used this theme as an opportunity to review the letters in the alphabet that we've learned already. This year I decided to keep moving forward with our momentum, but feel free to check out last year to see what we did!
A little off theme...
We made it to our 100th day of school! Along with reading the two 100 themed books named above. the children made "gumball machines" with dot painters and paper plates,.. We counted together either in groups of 10 or all the way from 1-100.
We made it to our 100th day of school! Along with reading the two 100 themed books named above. the children made "gumball machines" with dot painters and paper plates,.. We counted together either in groups of 10 or all the way from 1-100.
The letter of the week: P activities that we worked on this week were perfect! We started off the week reading Laura Numeroff's If You Give a Pig a Pancake and we made a retelling of the story! I gave each child a portion of the story to illustrate, then we put it together and read our retell.
We sang "I'm a Little Penguin" to the tune of I'm a little teapot from Perpetual Preschool.
I created envelope games for each letter of the alphabet. I adapted them from activities from Mailbox Letter of the Week projects, both book one and two. The children had to place the "P" pigs in the pond. All the other letters? No swimming here!
The children turned a capital letter P into a pig. I got the idea from the book Alphabet and Counting from Twin Sister Productions. They give tips for how to make it a glue and paste projects, but I like to give them crayons and the challenge to add the parts of the animal to the letter. It opens up room for more conversation about the shape of the letter AND the features of the animal.
We practice and work on our handwriting for each letter as well. The Original Summer Bridge Activities, for PreK-K has great handwriting practice sheets. The kids trace and write the letters and then have a little phonics practice at the bottom.
Each child has a journal that they write in every week. When we focus on a letter, they write for that letter. On shorter weeks and during our review later in the year, they write to the theme. This is such a great way to get children excited about writing and reading. I start the children out by tracing, and once they are comfortable and controlling the crayon well, they move onto copying.
As we work through the alphabet, the children make projects to go on our "alphabet wall". It's a very fun way for the class to see the alphabet in a new way. This week we made penguins. The shapes were all precut and put out on the table so that the children could create their own penguins. And they all turned out so cute! The idea came from pinterest!
From a Mailbox Letter of the Week book, the kids made a booklet about "Panda's Pillows". I like doing these kinds of books because they can go back and look at the pictures to help tell the story, and they are also able to do the project mostly on their own. When they are finished coloring the pages, they come and get their scissors. When they are finished cutting, they bring their pages to me, put away their scissors and clean up their area of paper scraps. I love it!
The book Sounds Like fun, Phonemic Awareness has great phonics activities for the alphabet. For the letter P, the children have to cut out and glue the words that "Begins like Pig". Together we talked about the beginning sounds of the words, and then they work on their fine motor cutting skills.
On Pinterest I found these adorable penguin templates and ideas for games to make out of them. I made three games, a pompom color match, an alphabet match game A-P and a number match game 1-13. I split the class into three groups and they had 5 minutes at each game. They had a lot of fun with this! Sometimes they would match them all before the time was up, so I would challenge them to do more, like putting the numbers or letters in order, and counting the pompoms to find out which has the most or least. And the penguins are just so cute!
We sang "I'm a Little Penguin" to the tune of I'm a little teapot from Perpetual Preschool.
I'm a little penguin, black and white,
I waddle to the left and I waddle to the right.
I can not fly but I can swim,
So I waddle to the water and jump right in!
We loved doing the actions for this song while we sang it. It is definitely a new favorite!
I created envelope games for each letter of the alphabet. I adapted them from activities from Mailbox Letter of the Week projects, both book one and two. The children had to place the "P" pigs in the pond. All the other letters? No swimming here!
The children turned a capital letter P into a pig. I got the idea from the book Alphabet and Counting from Twin Sister Productions. They give tips for how to make it a glue and paste projects, but I like to give them crayons and the challenge to add the parts of the animal to the letter. It opens up room for more conversation about the shape of the letter AND the features of the animal.
We practice and work on our handwriting for each letter as well. The Original Summer Bridge Activities, for PreK-K has great handwriting practice sheets. The kids trace and write the letters and then have a little phonics practice at the bottom.
Each child has a journal that they write in every week. When we focus on a letter, they write for that letter. On shorter weeks and during our review later in the year, they write to the theme. This is such a great way to get children excited about writing and reading. I start the children out by tracing, and once they are comfortable and controlling the crayon well, they move onto copying.
As we work through the alphabet, the children make projects to go on our "alphabet wall". It's a very fun way for the class to see the alphabet in a new way. This week we made penguins. The shapes were all precut and put out on the table so that the children could create their own penguins. And they all turned out so cute! The idea came from pinterest!
From a Mailbox Letter of the Week book, the kids made a booklet about "Panda's Pillows". I like doing these kinds of books because they can go back and look at the pictures to help tell the story, and they are also able to do the project mostly on their own. When they are finished coloring the pages, they come and get their scissors. When they are finished cutting, they bring their pages to me, put away their scissors and clean up their area of paper scraps. I love it!
The book Sounds Like fun, Phonemic Awareness has great phonics activities for the alphabet. For the letter P, the children have to cut out and glue the words that "Begins like Pig". Together we talked about the beginning sounds of the words, and then they work on their fine motor cutting skills.
On Pinterest I found these adorable penguin templates and ideas for games to make out of them. I made three games, a pompom color match, an alphabet match game A-P and a number match game 1-13. I split the class into three groups and they had 5 minutes at each game. They had a lot of fun with this! Sometimes they would match them all before the time was up, so I would challenge them to do more, like putting the numbers or letters in order, and counting the pompoms to find out which has the most or least. And the penguins are just so cute!
From the book Alphabet, Colors, Numbers and Shapes, the kids practice letter recognition AND direction following. Some weeks certain letters have to be colored specifically and sometimes it's up to them. I love these!
I made a cube of cardboard and glued pictures of "p" things one each side. The children say "Pinwheel, Pinwheel, what do I see.... I see a ____ looking at me!" They roll the cube and fill in the blank. This idea came from a Mailbox activity book for the letter A, and let me tell you, it was a hit!! They loved it!
During the week we made a list of words that begin with the letter P. Here is what we thought of!
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