Painting to Music! (U, V, & W)

The theme for the first week of June was "Painting to Music". Since we finished our Letter of the Week study, we are now reviewing our letters! This week we reviewed letters U, V, & W! Many of our projects over the next few weeks are in preparation for our Graduation! Check out the "If You Give a Butterfly a Diploma" post to see it all in one place! This week we made the shirts that everyone would wear for the ceremony, as well as the backdrop!

This week we read: Not a Box by Antoinette Portis
                                        Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site by Sherri Duskey Rinker
                                        The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
                                        LMNO Peas by Keith Baker
                                        Curious George Plants a Tree by Margret & HA Rey
                                 
Our question of the week was "What kind of music do you like?"

For a number review the children practiced the numbers 1-10, both counting and recognition of the numbers.

For our theme "Painting to Music",  we did exactly that! While listening to different styles of music each day, the children all painted on a large piece of white bulletin board paper. I love projects like this, free-form and loose, whatever the children want to do!

Country Music: Yellow, Orange and Brown paint.

Jazz Music: Blue, Red and Brown paint.

Classical Music: Red, Green and Yellow paint.

Dance Music: Blue, Purple and Yellow paint.

Rock Music: Red, Black and Purple paint.

I will be using these in a few weeks as the backdrop for our graduation ceremony!

The children wrote about the kinds of music that they like the best.

While reviewing the letters U, V, and W, 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 "we".

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, U, V, and W. 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 a wallaby, vulture and wolf!

I made an "I have, who has" game filled with U, V, and W 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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