Music (T, 17, Black)

The theme for the third week of February was "Music". We continued our Letter of the Week study with the letter T. This week we continued talking about colors with the color black, and we kept going on our number study with the number 17!

This week we read: Bear's New Friend by Karma Wilson
                                        Splat Sings Flat by Rob Scotton
                                        My First Chinese New Year by Karen Katz
                                        And To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss

Our question of the week was "What can you make music with?"

The color of the week: black was a lot of fun to explore.  We talked about things that are the color black and went on a hunt around our classroom to find things that are black.

We sang "We Know the Color Black" to the tune of Farmer in the Dell.

"We Know the color black,
we know the color black,
Tires and crows and licorice too,
We know the color black."
I got it from here!

(C) Jean Warren www.preschoolexpress.com

For the number of the week:17 we started off by counting to and backward from seventeen. 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 seventeen. 

When I started in my class, I found a page like this from education.com, so I made my own for the number 17. 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 "Music", we had so much fun dancing! Throughout the days I would turn on music, and whatever we were doing we would stop and dance for about 2 minutes.

We made patterns of rhythm using maracas, tambourines and our bodies. After I made a few and had the children follow, they took turns to make their own!

A little off topic: This week we also celebrated the Lunar New Year. Welcome to the year of the Goat! The kids painted these really cool Chinese dragon heads that I found online. I let them choose which ones they wanted to paint, and then cut them out and glued them onto bright construction paper. They turned out awesome!

We also made spin drums! I and my assistant teacher put them together ahead of time, and the kids painted them. We staples 2 small white plates together, attached them to a wide popsicle stick and finally tied two strings with beads on each side. They were very intrigued when they saw them and could hardly wait for them to dry so that they could spin them!

In the sensory table I put these chinese alphabet blocks out. On different sides they have numbers, letter, words and puzzle! The kids had a really fun time with these.

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

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 "T" items on the turtle's shell so he could carry them across the river. All the other letters? Have to wait for the next animal I guess!

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.

The children turned a capital letter T into a turtle. 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.

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.

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!

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 turtles. The children dot painted them, and they look so colorful and happy!

From a Mailbox Letter of the Week book, the kids made a booklet about "Tiger's Teatime". 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!

I found these short videos about "t" animals that we watched through the week. There was one about turtles and tigers. They went nuts for it! The kids really enjoy when randomly throughout the day we take a break to watch an animal video.

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

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

Being Healthy (Ff, 3, Octagons)

The theme for the 8th week of the school year was "Being Healthy". We continued our Letter of the Week study, with the letter F. This week we also focused on the octagon shape, and we kept going on our number study with the number 3!

This week we read: Grandmas Are For Giving Tickles by Harriet Ziefert
                                        Grandpas Are For finding Worms by Harriet Ziefert
                                        Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late by Mo Willems
                                        The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food by Stan and Jan Berenstain
                                        Gregory the Terrible Eater by Mitchell Sharmat

Our question of the week was "What is one reason that you like the fall?"

The shape of the week: octagon was fun to talk about. At our morning meetings, we would talk about the shape and things in real life that are an octagons. We also practiced drawing octagons in the air, which to be honest, is really kind of difficult! The children worked on their fine motor skills and shape recognition by finding octagons. I made this sheet myself based on recognition sheets that we have already done.

For our song this week we sang "This is an Octagons", I wrote this one myself based on some of the shape songs that we have already sang. There's not a whole lot of catchy songs out there for octagons. :/

"This is an octagon, this is an octagon,

How can you tell? How can you tell?

It had 8 sides,

And looks like a stop sign, 

It's an octagon, it's an octagon."

For the number of the week: 3 we started off by counting to three and backward from three. The kids had no problem with this one. ;) The kids also practiced writing the number and word for three.

In some papers in my room I found a random number page like this from education.com, so I made my own for the number 3. The children had to practice writing the number and then color in that number of squares. What a great way to really introduce graphing and what a great way for them to work on their one-to-one correspondence.

For our theme "Being Healthy", we touched on how to stay healthy in different aspects of life. We started off my talking about how to keep our smiles and teeth healthy. I made this large tooth, and each child told me something that they do for their teeth. We watched these short videos that I found on Sesame Street. There were three videos on the Healthy Teeth, Healthy Me toolkit. Captain Mega Super Ultra Smile Man is pretty cool too.... I think I got his name right... =].

I drew plaque infested teeth on white boards and the children used toothbrushes to clean them!

We exercised using the parachute! Parachute games are so fun, and there is just a certain excitement that fills the air when the kids see the parachute coming out. =]

I also made this exercise activity cube (you know in the spirit of my cube making every week... I've gotten quite good at them!) Each child had turns to roll the cube and we all participated in the direction. It really got us moving!

We sorted different foods into what we thought were healthy choices and not so healthy choices. Then we talked about the kinds of food that we should be eating more than others.

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

The children turned a capital letter F into a fish. 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 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 put the "F" fish in the Fishbowl. All the other letters? They needed to find a different bowl!

We went "fishing for F's". On cutouts of fish I wrote letters A-F. I put a paperclip on each fish and the kids used a fishing pole with a magnet on the end to catch a fish! They had to name the letter they got. If it was and F, they got to keep it, and if it was a different letter they had to "throw it back in".

Grandparents joined us for a breakfast to celebrate how much we love them. While they were visiting our class, we all finger painted fish for our Alphabet Wall. As we work through the alphabet, the children will make projects to go on the wall. It's a very fun way for the class to see the alphabet in a new way. By the way, watching grandparents paint is really fun!

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.

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!

We danced the Hokey Pokey while we pretended to be foxes (bushy tails, pointy ears, paws) Love it!

I made a cube of cardboard and glued pictures of "F" things one each side. The children say "Firefly, firefly 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, and let me tell you, it was a hit!! They loved it!

Also from a Mailbox Book we made A Flower for Fox!

During the week we made a list of words that begin with the letter F. I totally forgot to take a picture.. coming soon!

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

Flowers! (Y, 22, Yellow, Rectangle)

Our theme this week was "Flowers" and we focused on the letter Y, number 22 and we revisited the color yellow and square rectangle.

Our school is also getting ready for our Art Show. all the projects are completed I will take pictures and show you our super cool "Garden". It's getting exiting! This weeks little preview.... our Pumpkin Plant!

We read this week: Mortimer's First Garden by Karma Wilson
                               Arthur's Chicken Pox by Marc Brown
                               The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack
                               The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle
                               The Pigeon Wants a Puppy by Mo Willems

Our question of the week was "What kind of food do you think is super yummy?"

For our theme of the week, we sorted flowers again. Since we did this last week as a group, this time I just put the flowers out and let the kids play their own sorting game.

Okay, so celery is not really a flower, but we talked about how plants and flowers drink their water up from the ground and I thought the best way to illustrate that would be the celery experiment!
SUPER SIMPLE TO DO!
I got 4 celery stalks (full stalks with the leaves at the top) and put one in plain water, and one in each dyed water blue, yellow and red. I showed the class the set up and we made hypotheses about what would happen to the celery. (I made the worksheet up for this one).

Then we looked at the celery that had been sitting in the water for a few hours t osee what actually happened. That was what we recorded on our papers.

Just for fun I kept the celery around to the end of the week and it looked SO COOL!

We made yarn flowers! Ahead of time I cut out pieces of string in different colors. When they came over to my small group table I "drew" a flower in glue for them to cover in the yarn. I thought it was a nice little variance on strengthening their fine motor skills.

Our song of the week was "Pretty Flowers" to the tune of  Jingle bells from here.

"Pretty flowers, pretty flowers,

Growing everywhere.

Here are some pretty flowers

For your coat or hair.

Pretty flowers, pretty flowers,

Gold and pink and blue.

Red and yellow, orange and purple,

I picked them just for you!"

(C) 2001 - 2011 Jean Warren www.preschoolexpress.com

We talked again about the color yellow. Bonus that it starts with our letter of the week!

We made a book about things that are the color yellow.

We talked about the shape rectangle. We made a list and walked around the classroom trying to find things that are the shape.

I also asked the children to practice finding and recognizing rectangles on a worksheet. It came from the book Alphabet, Colors, Numbers and Shapes.

When we worked on our number activities, we practiced writing the number and word for the number 22.

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 Yy from this book.

The students wrote in their journals for the letter y. 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 Y into a Yellow Jacket! 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!

We made a book about things that we did yesterday! I love making class books, because they can go through and look at them later to see the great work that they and their friends did! I got the idea for the book from Alphabet on Parade.

They made a little flip book about a yellow yo-yo from the Letter of the Week Book 2.

For our alphabet wall we made yaks! I got the picture of the yak from the Letter of the Week Book 1. Then the kids glued on some yarn!

Here are the words we came up with this week!

Up next week: "The Week of The Young Child/Hop-a-thon!" and a focus on the letter Zz, number 23, color purple and oval.