L is for Lizard!
A nice book that I've mention this past summer I think, is called Lizard's Song by George Shannon. The summer kiddos as well as the ones today can be heard humming "Zoli, zoli, zoli...". One daily activity we do is a journal in response to the book we read.
Eventually the children will begin writing their own responses. At this point in the year I start out with a fill in the blank sentence related to the book and they answer it, I write their answer, and they draw the picture. Sometimes the answers are the same, like today, but other times they are quite different. After we accumulate a few journal pages I'll bind them together and send them home. Each journal page will have the book and author at the bottom so I'm hoping the parents will read this book with their child. Children are so excited when we read a book they are familiar with at home and vice versa. And repetitive readings of a book has so much value!
We also started into our focus letter. Last week we worked with Mat Man and discussing sticks, curves, horizontal/vertical/diagonal lines and this week we used some of our Handwriting Without Tears tools to create the letter L.
Sticks and Curves Set with Captial Letter Cards
(I really did not get very good pictures at all this morning so I'll use their thumbnails from www.hwtears.com.
We first used the capital L card to talk about whether we use sticks, curves, or both to make the letter. Then they created the letter L with their own sticks in front of them.
Stamp and See Screen
Now picture it with the letter L. :-P We used the magnet sticks to create the L, then we used the magnet to trace over L. This tool is going to get a lot of use I think.
Roll a Dough Letters
I love that all of their items have the smiley face at the top left hand corner. I used to use green smiley stickers and then moved to green dots long before I know about Handwriting Without Tears. It's just a great way to create a visual of where to start when writing.
Slate Boards
Children used a small sponge chunk to write the letter L, then traced over with a chalk piece, then erased with the sponge again...all whiles saying L says /l/. This repetition really pays off!
We also did some Math Explorations with lizards. My goal today was to see what they remembered from last year. So I set some items out and said, "See what you can do here at this desk".
Concepts that we introduced last year that I was looking for...
* creating a more/less set using the symbol correctly.
* oral counting and counting with meaning.
* 1:1 correspondence with counting as well as placing one lizard on one branch
* if they remembered what a plus, minus, equal sign meant
* if they could sort by one characteristic and also verbalize their sorting technique.
* patterning-though this is a little more difficult to get with a set of so many different colors. This works best when you provide just 2 colors. We did a little patterning last week during journal time so I saw where they were at and so I wasn't watching as closely for this skill.
* measurement language
L is for Longer.
This past Mailbox Preschool Publication had a simple "Longer/Shorter" book that fit very well into our morning this morning since we were talking a bit measuring with the lizards. We used this as our scissors activity.
No time to share everything so will let this be all until tomorrow.
Have a lovely week!
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