Showing posts with label green eggs and ham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label green eggs and ham. Show all posts

Monday, March 16, 2015

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss! (V, 19, Rectangle, Red)

The theme for the first week of March was "Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss". We continued our Letter of the Week study with the letter V and our number study with the number 18! 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 started off with red and stars.


This week we readGreen Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss
                                        Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss
                                        The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
                                        One Fish, Two Fish by Dr. Seuss
                                        The Lorax by Dr. Seuss (We ultimately did not read this book because one
                                                                               of our days was very snowy and we just had a play                                                                                  day with the few children that ventured out.)

The beginning of a new month means that we finished our calendar pattern for February, and we compared this year's weather to last years!

Our question of the week was "Do you like green eggs and ham?"

To review the color red we colored pictures of red 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, then I am all for it!

To review the rectangle shape the children practiced recognizing the shape and colored rectangles.

For the number of the week:19 we started off by counting to and backward from nineteen. 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 nineteen. 

When I started in my class, I found a page like this from education.com, so I made my own for the number 19. 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 "Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss", we ate Green Eggs and Ham! Yum!


We sang "The Cat in the Hat Song" to the tune of the Adaams Family.

The kids each decorated their own Cat hat.

After we read The Cat in the Hat, we were inspired to try to balance like the cat. We balanced on each foot, held different objects and had a lot of fun!

After reading "One Fish, Two Fish..." we went alphabet fishing! I love when I get to use a project more than once. It makes all the time making it so much more worth it! I wrote the capital and lowercase letter on each fish, and when the children "caught" one, they had to tell us what letter it was and think of a word that starts with it.

One of our amazing families this year sent in these adorable One Fish, Two Fish cupcakes... Yum!

We painted Truffula trees to put a very colorful mural in our room. I created the trees and painted everything but the tuft, and each child got to pick their own tree color and paint it.

The letter of the week: V activities that we worked on this week were very fun!!
The book Sounds Like fun, Phonemic Awareness has great phonics activities for the alphabet. For the letter V, the children have to cut out and glue the words that "Begins like Vulture". Together we talked about the beginning sounds of the words, and then they work on their fine motor cutting skills.

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 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 "V" items in the vegetable bag.  All the other letters? No purchase today!


From a Mailbox Letter of the Week book, the kids made a project called the "Village of V". I love these kinds of projects because it reinforces the letter sounds and it is also a project that the kids can prety much do on their own. I give short instructions, and then they color and cut, and when they are done, they recycle their scraps.

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.

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 vegetables. The children painted different vegetables and then we put them in a little vegetable patch on the wall!

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.

The children turned a capital letter V into a vulture. 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.

I made a cube of cardboard and glued pictures of "V" things one each side. The children say "Vulture, vulture, 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 V. Here is what we thought of!

We also celebrated FOUR birthdays this week!



 Leave a comment below and let me know that you stopped by!

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Happy Birthday, Dr Seuss! (and Me!) (U, 18, Orange)

Our theme this week was "Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss" and we focused on the letter U, number 18 and color orange.

We read this week:  The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
                               The Cat in the Hat Comes Back by Dr. Seuss
                               One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss
                               The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
                               Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

Our question of the week was "Who is your favorite Dr. Seuss Character?" We've read some Dr. Seuss already this year, so I quickly reminded them of the different characters that we have met.

For our theme of the week, we had so much Seuss-y fun. On Youtube, I found some of the original movies, so we watched The Sneetches (beware- they say "stupid" which prompted a discussion about not-nice words), and The Zax. I saw that there are also the original cartoons of Green Eggs and Ham, and Horton Hears a Who. We also watched The Lorax, and Horton Hears a Who. We stopped centers a little early and split each movie into 40 minute sittings before lunch. the kids LOVED the special movie treats.

The kids were so great and really enjoyed celebrating my birthday AND Dr. Seuss's.

We balanced like The Cat in the Hat. It was fun to have them try balancing on one foot while doing all sorts of silly things with their hands. We jumped and hopped on one foot, and even tried to dance!

The kids each decorated a Cat Hat with crayons and tissue paper. I love the individuality!


After reading "One Fish, Two Fish..." we went alphabet fishing! I love when I get to use a project more than once. It makes all the time making it so much more worth it! I wrote the capital and lowercase letter on each fish, and when the children "caught" one, they had to tell us what letter it was and think of a word that starts with it.

Each child got to paint a Truffula tree for our class mural. I even made a vine while getting it ready!

We made and ate green eggs and ham!! It was so fun!

The Cat in the Hat even came to visit with us!

We talked about the color orange, and we sang "We love orange"
"We love orange, we love orange,
yes we do, yes we do.
Crunchy carrots so good to eat,
Juicy oranges, oh so sweet!
Pumpkins ready for trick-or-treat,
we love orange."
 (C) Jean Warren www.preschoolexpress.com
I got it from here!

When we focus on a color I love to do "color hunts" in our classroom. Each child takes a turn to walk
around the classroom and bring back something that they found that is orange. Here is what we found. 

When we worked on our number activities, we practiced writing the number and word for the number 18.

I made these worksheets that reinforces the one to one concept. The kids practice writing the number and have to color a square for each picture that they see.

For our letter activities, we used our handwriting sheet for the letter Uu from this book.

The students wrote in their journals for the letter U. It's really cool to see the children thinking about what they want to put in their journal. They love these books and always want to go through them when they're finished writing for the day.

We turned a U into a Unicorn! This book is great.


This book has great pages for helping the kids work on the letter recognition of both the capital and the lowercase versions of the letter, and they are always a little different, which is great!

My kids did a great job of turning shapes into an underwater picture! I cut out the different shapes for them ahead of time, they picked three, and then let their imaginations run wild! It came from this Letter of the Week book.

From this Alphabet on Parade book, I got the idea to have the kids practice the concepts of "over" and "under". I drew and umbrella and 12 small pictures for them to cut out and glue either over or under the umbrella. I let them pretty much do their own thing on this project and then tucked it away in their portfolios.

From Sounds Like Fun, I got the idea to buy little paper party drink umbrellas and say different vowel sound words. Anytime they hear a long or short u sound, they had to put up their umbrellas! So fun. Bonus, they got to keep the umbrellas and were thrilled!

For our alphabet wall we made urchins! (I know it's a bit of a stretch, but the kids went with it and loved it. That being said, I had to make an ocean portion of our wall, which will come in handy when we make whales!

Here are the words we came up with this week!

I was not the only birthday we celebrated this week. Yum!




I know I put a lot of updates on here about our pumpkin plant from the Halloween post, but it has not yet ceased to amaze me with it's growth! We are still getting new shoots... and this week, we got our first blossom!!! Really for a project that was so easy to do, the kids just filled the pumpkin with dirt and as they started to decompose I planted them under dirt, we are fascinated every day!



Up next week: "Shamrocks" and a focus on the letter Vv, number 19, color green and circle shape.