Spring Has Sprung! (Yy, 22, Yellow, Star)

The theme for the last week of March was "Spring Has Sprung", and boy were my kids happy to celebrate the return of Spring! We continued our Letter of the Week study with the letter Y and our number study with the number 22! 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 yellow and stars.

This week we read: The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle
                                        Fletcher and the Springtime Blossoms by Julia Rawlinson
                                        The Story of the Root Children by Sibylle von Olfers
                                        Jamberry by Bruce Degen
                                        Duck by Randy Cecil

Our question of the week was "What is your favorite thing to do in the springtime?"

To review the color yellow we colored pictures of yellow 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 star shape the children practiced recognizing the shape and colored stars. I created this little picture with full of stars in it. They needed to color the stars yellow and then the rest of the picture!

For the number of the week:22 we started off by counting to and backward from twenty-two. 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-two. 

When I started in my class, I found a page like this from education.com, so I made my own for the number 22. 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 "Spring has Sprung", we went outside to search for spring! Out on our playground and on our school's nature trail, we looked for signs that spring was really here.

We sang "Pretty Little Flower" to the tune of Itsy Bitsy Spider.

"Pretty little flower, smiling at the sun.
Down comes the rain, now she looks so glum.
Back comes the sun and dries up all the rain.
And the pretty little flower, is smiling once again!"

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

The kids played a quick flower sorting game that I made. I made a set of flowers that I "laminated" with contact paper. The set worked so that they could be sorted by color of the petals or number of the petals. They did so great!

We painted giant flowers! I can't show you the final projects because this is something we will be putting into our Eric Carle themed art show in April, but here's a preview!

The letter of the week: Y activities that we worked on this week were y-great!! 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 "Y" items in the yard.  All the other letters? Back in the shed!

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 Y into a Yellow Jacket. 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.

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

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.

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 yaks with some yarn hair. They colored their yaks and glued on some yarn!

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 made a class book call "Yakking about Yesterday" where each child illustrated something that they did yesterday. They got such a kick out of it when we read it later in the day!

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

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

Landscapes! (X, Y, Z and 1-10)

 Our theme this week was "Landscapes" and we focused on reviewing the numbers 1-10, and the letters X, Y and Z. This week we also got ready for Father's Day!

We read this week:  Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss
                                Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barret
                                I Love My Daddy by Sebastien Braun
                                I Love My Daddy by David Bedford
                               The Night Before Father's Day by Natasha Wing

Our question of the week was "Why do you love Dad?"

For our themes of the week,  we took long walks outside and down our nature trail. Our school is in such a great location, and my classroom looks out on the woods behind us. The playground has trees and plants all around it and our nature trail goes down in to the woods, so we are always talking about the plants and nature around us.

We painted pictures of trees and forests.

One of the other teachers in our school made paint ice cubes by mixing some tempera paint and water together and freezing them with popsicle sticks in them. These were so fun! I had planned for us to paint outside, but the day that we were going to, we had torrential rain, so we had to make do with indoor ice painting! The finished products look so cool!

This was a neat alternative to just using watercolor paints I think. I will say that there is a small window of when the paint cubes are the perfect temperature. Once you pass that and they start to really melt we ended up with very wet paper and drips on the floor under our drying rack. I'm not afraid of a little bit of cleaning, and I actually think the "drippy" pictures are super cool! They remind me  of the style of paintings that my sister does!

For father's day, we drew pictures of our dads.

We wrote in our journals about why we love Dad.

And we made our gifts for Dad. This year I wanted to do something a little different, and something that my kids could use with their dads. First they drew and colored pictures on a page that I had drawn out puzzle pieces. Then I glued them to a piece of construction paper and then cut them out. I thought about having the kids cut them, but I realized that the curved cuts and the thicker paper would be really hard for them. Then I put the pieces in an envelope with a little poem glued on the front and tied it together with 2 chocolate chip cookies. When I talked to my kids the following Monday, they were all so excited about sharing a cookie and doing the puzzles with their dads.

The teachers in our school also hosted a "Donuts for Dad" breakfast.

Our song of the week was "We Are Here to Graduate", to the tune of London Bridge. We will sing this song while we walk into graduation. It's getting close!

"We are here to graduate, graduate, graduate.
We are here to graduate, on this special day."

For our numbers, I found these great review sheets for the numbers 1-10 in The Complete Book of Numbers and Counting.

For our letter activities, we reviewed writing and finding the letters that we are talking about; U, V and W. These pages came from Letters for Little Learners.

The letter of the week books have pages that you can make into a book. I picked from both to get my "favorites". Each week, we work on some of these pages, and each child at the end will have an alphabet book. 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!

This week the "X" page came from Book 1, the "V" page came from Book 2, and the "N" page came from Book 2.

We also worked more on recognizing our review letters in the tongue twisters from Alphabet and Counting. We used this book to turn our letters into fun animals, but on the pages is also a little tongue twister. I printed it large and made a picture, then laminated them with contact paper. Using wet erase markers, we take turns finding the letters that are hidden!

We kept working on our sight words! Every morning we go over around 10 of them. Once we've mastered them, they will go on our sight word wall! So exciting! We're working our way through the 220 Dolch sight word list.

Speaking of sight words, from Confessions of a HomeSchooler, I got these great sight word pages. We continued this week with the words "you".

Our American Toads wanted to model this week. =]

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.