Going Green! (A&B, 24, Orange, Oval)

The theme for the second week of April was "Going Green". Since we finished our Letter of the Week study last week, we began reviewing our letters! We started off our review with letters A & B and continued our number study with the number 24! We have gone through our shapes and colors once, so from now until graduation, we will talk about two each week and do some small review activities. We worked this week on ovals and orange.

This week we read: The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
                                        The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear by Don Wood
                                        Maple by Lori Nichols
                                        Stuck by Oliver Jeffers
                                        Curious George Plants a Tree by Margret & HA Rey

Our question of the week was "How can you "Go Green"?"

To review the color orange we talked about things in real life, at morning meeting, that are orange. The kids also colored pictures of orange things. I found these pages on pinterest, and I love the concept! My general rule of thumb is that if the children can explain to me their reasoning for coloring an object, then I am all for it!

To review the oval shape the children practiced recognizing the shape and colored ovals. I created this little picture full of the shape. They needed to color the oval balloons one color and then the rest of the balloons other colors!

For the number of the week:24 we started off by counting to and backward from twenty-four. 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 twenty-four. 

When I started in my class, I found a page like this from education.com, so I made my own for the number 24. 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 "Going Green", the children played with recycled materials and shredded in the sensory table. This was the sensory table that they were the most interested in so far this year! They loved it!

We sang "Reduce, Reuse Recycle" to the tune of Itsy Bitsy Spider.

"Reduce, reuse, recycle, words that we all know.
We have to save our planet so we can live and grow.
We might be only children, but we will try you'll see.
That we can save this planet it starts with you and me."

We planted seeds of various vegetable and herb plants that will (hopefully) go into our schools garden! Fingers crossed!

With wax paper and crayons the children made Earth Suncatchers!

The children made recycle themed collages! They colored pictures of recyclable items and glued them on to construction paper, added stickers and then glued on recycled shredded paper.

In their journals, the class wrote about things that they can do to help the planet.

While reviewing the letter A and B, we are really focusing on practicing writing, having good control over letter formation, and having a solid knowledge of the letter sounds.

My children that are moving on to kindergarten next year, are working on sight words and this worksheet from Confessions of a Homeschooler are amazing! They challenge the children to think of the word in a new way and get creative. This week they worked on the word "am".

I created envelope games for each letter of the alphabet that we played the first way through the alphabet. My children that are staying with me another year played these again to work on their letter sounds.

We reviewed writing and finding the letters that we are talking about, A and B. The pages for my younger group came from Letters for Little Learners, and I found these more advanced worksheets for my older children from education.com.

The book Alphabet and Counting that we used used  to turn our letters into fun animals, also has cute little tongue twisters for each letter. I printed them large and illustrated them, then I laminated them with contact paper. Using wet erase markers, we take turns finding the letters hidden!
On their own, they searched for the letters as well!

The letter of the week books have pages that you can make a book into. I picked from both to get my "favorites". Each week, we'll work on these pages, and each child will end up with an alphabet book at the end of the year. I like to do these pages, because not only do they get more practice writing the letter, but they also have to finish the sentence on the page, which is really cool. It gets them thinking!

There is a 15-20 minute span of time while the children are waking up from our rest time and afternoon snack. During this time, we talk about what they will be doing in the afternoon with their afternoon teacher, and what we did in the morning. We also spend some time learning about animals through videos. This week we watched about the alligator, akita, antelope, armadillo, affenpinscher, bat, beaver, bee one, bee two, butterfly, blue tongued skink, bison, buffalo one, and buffalo two.

I made an "I have, who has" game filled with A and B things. I love this game because once it starts, the children completely direct it. I love seeing them help each other and play with each other.

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