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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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!

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Painting to Music

 Our theme this week was "Painting to Music" and we focused on getting ready for graduation! This is one of my favorite themes, because it's so fun for the kids to listen to and react the the different genres of music.

We also spent time this week getting prepared for our graduation ceremony on Friday afternoon!

We read this week: The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
                               Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss
                               Oh, The Thinks You Can Think by Dr. Seuss
                               The Night Before Kindergarten by Natasha Wing
                               The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
                               The Night Before Summer Vacation by Natasha Wing

Our question of the week was "What was your favorite thing that we did in school?"

And we wrote in journals about this question too.

For our themes of the week,  we painted to 4 different kinds of music; Classical, Country, Rock and Blues. Each day the kids listened to the music for about a minute and then we talked about the way it made them feel. Then we talked about how those feelings should be be reflected in our paintings.

For classical music we listened to a playlist of Tchaikovsky's The Seasons, and we painted with purple, green and orange. Most of the kids said that the music made them feel sleepy.

For Country music we listened to a playlist of Lady Antebellum, Rascal Flatts and Keith Urban. We painted with yellow, orange and brown. The kids really liked the country music!

For Rock music we listened to a playlist of The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi. We painted with purple, orange and yellow. The kids just wanted to dance!! So, we had a little dance party after everyone finished their paintings.

For Blues music we listened to a playlist of Mississippi John Hurt and B.B. King. We used green, purple and blue paint. They told me that this wasn't really their favorite =/, but I enjoyed it!

For our practice activities, we matched shapes with worksheets from Summerbridge Pre-K-K. I love these books because they have such great worksheets for keeping the learning going at home over the summer as well as worksheets that I use throughout the year.

Dot-to-dots are such a fun way to practice counting! We did this really cool one of a cat from The Complete Book of Numbers and Counting.

Also from that book the kids followed a number maze from 1-20.

Practicing colors with raindrops is so fun! They kids have to use their letter knowledge and color words to complete the worksheet. This came from Alphabet, Colors, Numbers and Shapes.

We played beginning consonant sound Bingo!

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.

My new favorite thing is adding glitter to playdough. So pretty!