Construction! (Qq, 14, Yellow)

The theme for the last week of January was "Construction". We continued our Letter of the Week study with the letter Q. This week we continued talking about colors with the color yellow, and we kept going on our number study with the number 14!

We finished the the first month of 2015! So naturally, it was time to compare the weather from this year and last. The kids also did a great job keeping our pattern for the calendar numbers this month.

This week we read: Curious George and the Dump Truck by HA & Margret Rey
                                        Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site by Sherry Duskey Rinker
                                        Steam Train, Dream Train by Sherry Duskey Rinker
                                        Snow Day by Betsy Maestro
                                        Lost & Found by Oliver Jeffers

Our question of the week was "What would you not like 100 of?"

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

We sang "Bright Yellow Sun" to the tune of Row Your Boat.

"Bright sun shining down,
Shining on the ground.
What a lovely face you have,
Yellow big and round."

For the number of the week:14 we started off by counting to and backward from fourteen. 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 fourteen. 

When I started in my class, I found a page like this from education.com, so I made my own for the number 14. 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 "Construction", we looked at different structures on the computer, like the great wall, the eiffel tower etc. I challenged the kids to try to build some structures like this in the blocks center. I also added some styrofoam squares used to package a lamp for everyone to build with.

In the sensory table I added lincoln logs to the snow. Building in the snow!

We sang the "Construction Song" to the tune of Farmer in the Dell from here.

The kids painted a picture of a dump truck. When they were finished painting, they glued some sand on top to make it look like the trucks were carrying a load to a construction site.

The letter of the week: Q activities that we worked on this week were quite great! The book Sounds Like fun, Phonemic Awareness has great phonics activities for the alphabet. For the letter Q, the children have to cut out and glue the words that "Begins like Quail". 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 "Q" squares onto the Queen's quilt. All the other letters? We ran out of room!

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 kids each made a self portrait quilt square that I turned into a class quilt! Every year that I am in a classroom I have done one of these paper quilts. I just love them!

The children turned a capital letter Q into a quail. 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.

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

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 quails. They colored a cut out outline, and then glued on feathers. So fun!

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

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

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (Pp, 13, Brown)

The theme for the third week of January was "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom". We continued our Letter of the Week study with the letter P. This week we continued talking about colors with the color brown, and we kept going on our number study with the number 13!

This week we read:  If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff
                                        100 Snowmen by Jennifer Arena
                                        The 100th Day of School by Angela Shelf Madearis
                                        Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr.
                                        Curious George Makes Pancakes by HA & Margret Rey

Our question of the week was "What would you like 100 of?"

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

We sang "Three Brown Bears" to the tune of Three Blind Mice.

"Three brown bears, three brown bears.

See all their beds, see all their chairs.

The Mommy cooks in a big brown pot,

The Daddy's porridge was much too hot,

The Baby Bear always cries a lot,

Three Brown Bears"

For the number of the week:13 we started off by counting to and backward from thirteen. 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 thirteen. 

When I started in my class, I found a page like this from education.com, so I made my own for the number 13. 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 "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom", I have to be honest, that we really did not do a lot with it this year. In years past I have used this theme as an opportunity to review the letters in the alphabet that we've learned already. This year I decided to keep moving forward with our momentum, but feel free to check out last year  to see what we did!

A little off theme...
We made it to our 100th day of school! Along with reading the two 100 themed books named above. the children made "gumball machines" with dot painters and paper plates,.. We counted together either in groups of 10 or all the way from 1-100.

The letter of the week: P activities that we worked on this week were perfect! We started off the week reading Laura Numeroff's If You Give a Pig a Pancake and we made a retelling of the story! I gave each child a portion of the story to illustrate, then we put it together and read our retell.

We sang "I'm a Little Penguin" to the tune of I'm a little teapot from Perpetual Preschool.

I'm a little penguin, black and white,

I waddle to the left and I waddle to the right.

I can not fly but I can swim,

So I waddle to the water and jump right in!

We loved doing the actions for this song while we sang it. It is definitely a new favorite!

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 "P" pigs in the pond. All the other letters? No swimming here!

The children turned a capital letter P into a pig. 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.

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.

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 penguins. The shapes were all precut and put out on the table so that the children could create their own penguins. And they all turned out so cute! The idea came from pinterest!

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

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

On Pinterest I found these adorable penguin templates and ideas for games to make out of them. I made three games, a pompom color match, an alphabet match game A-P and a number match game 1-13. I split the class into three groups and they had 5 minutes at each game. They had a lot of fun with this! Sometimes they would match them all before the time was up, so I would challenge them to do more, like putting the numbers or letters in order, and counting the pompoms to find out which has the most or least.  And the penguins are just so cute!

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 found these short videos about "p" animals that we watched through the week. There was one about Pandas, polar bears, platypus, penguins and pigs. 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 "p" things one each side. The children say "Pinwheel, Pinwheel, 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 P. Here is what we thought of!

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

Let it Snow! (Oo, 12, White)

The theme for the second week of January was "Let it Snow". We continued our Letter of the Week study with the letter O. This week we continued talking about colors with the color white, and we kept going on our number study with the number 12!

This week we read: It's Snowing! by Gail Gibbons
                                        Let it Snow! by Maryann Cocca-Leffler
                                        Snow Happy! by Patricia Hubbell
                                        The Snowy Day by Anna Milbourne
                                        Curious George in the Snow by HA & Margret Rey

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

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

We sang "We Love White" to the tune of Three Blind Mice.

"We love white, we love white.

That is right, that is right.

Clouds above and milk and glue,

Santa's beard, snow and ghosts say BOO!

Bunnies and paper are white too,

We love white"

As a class we brainstormed a GIANT list of things that are white. The kids then each picked what they wanted to draw, and we made a class book.

For the number of the week:12 we started off by counting to and backward from twelve. 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 twelve. 

When I started in my room I found some papers in my room I found a random number page like this from education.com, so I made my own for the number 12. 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 "Let it Snow", we watched Frozen and ate popcorn for a super fun morning! That movie was made for this theme, right?

The kids made snowmen! I found this idea here, and just fell in love with it. I precut white and black squares and orange triangles, and set the kids free. I love how they each made their own special snowman. They really enjoyed this project too.

We freeze danced! We used instruments to help the kids make sure that they were freezing and they had so much fun doing this.

In the sensory table we made snow using 1 cup baking soda and 1/3 cup conditioner.

The letter of the week: O activities that we worked on this week were outstanding! 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 "O" items on the ox. All the other letters? They had to find somewhere else!

From a Mailbox Letter of the Week book, the kids made a booklet about "Where is Octopus". 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!

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

In our school gym we made an obstacle course! We did four rounds and added to the "course" each time. The kids had a lot of fun with all of the climbing, sliding, crawling and jumping!

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 kids decorated a snowman picture, and then we stamped over it with an orange, in orange! What's more wintery than an orange snowman?

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!

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 colored small owls. These went up with our nests from last week!

The children turned a capital letter O into a octopus. 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 found these short videos about "o" animals that we watched through the week. There was one about octopi, otters, ostriches and owls.

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

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