Monday, May 25, 2015

Transportation! (G&H, 27, Pink, Pentagon)

The theme for the last week of April was "Transportation!". Since we finished our Letter of the Week study, we are now reviewing our letters! This week we reviewed letters G & H and continued our number study with the number 27! 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 pentagons and pink.

This week we readHow to Make Apple Pie and See The World by Marjorie Priceman
                                        Polar Opposites by Erik Brooks
                                        Steam Train, Dream Train by Sherri Dusky Rinker
                                        I Love Planes by Philemon Sturgis
                                        Curious George Takes a Train by Margret & HA Rey

Our question of the week was "Where do you want to go on vacation?"

To review the color pink we talked about things in real life, at morning meeting, that are pink. The kids also colored pictures of pink things. I found these pages on pinterest, and I love the concept! There wasn't one for pink, so I made my own! 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 square pentagons the children practiced recognizing the shape and colored pentagons. I created this little picture full of the shape. They needed to color the pentagon houses pink and then the rest of the picture!

For the number of the week:27 we started off by counting to and backward from twenty-seven. 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-seven. 

When I started in my class, I found a page like this from education.com, so I made my own for the number 27. 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 "Transportation",  we did my favorite project of the entire year! I turned a white shower curtain from the dollar store into a map and the children colored it in over the course of a few days! Then we had it to use as a unique playmat!

While walking in line all week, we pretended to be a train!
The children also colored specific shapes in a picture of a train. I kept this to tuck away in their portfolios.

We sang "The Wheels on the Bus."

I wrote the letters in each child's name on colorful squares, which turned into cargo on their name trains!

We played "Red Light Green Light" while outside on the playground.

The children each made a straw rocket, and then we raced them! These were definitely a class favorite!


In their journals, the children wrote about somewhere that they would like to take a train to.

While reviewing the letter G and H, 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 "go".

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, G and H. 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 one, two, three, four, five videos about hamsters. The class could not get enough! We also watched one and two about hedgehogs, hippos, hyenas, horses, hummingbirds, gorillas, goats, gerbils, geckos and one, two, three about giraffes.

I made an "I have, who has" game filled with G and H 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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