Monday, October 3, 2011

D is for...

D is for Dissolve!
Because my oldest student is moving beyond sensory pool I have decided to begin more science experiments/explorations a couple days of the week vs. sensory pool explorations.  So today marks are first "experiment" of the school year.  In this picture, we obviously hadn't finished with the "actual" results.

D is for Day
This book we "read" today.  It's a nonfiction book, so nice to review different types of genre.  Lots of words though-and can not be read like a story book.  One spread of pages...
led us to the following simple scissors activity.

D is for Dominoes!
 The Domino Parking Lot printable is from www.mathwire.com.  She chose a domino, counted the dots and drove the domino to it's appropriate parking spot.  And, of course, we might as well slip in a little letter formation.  I'm not a big worksheet person.  They have their place, and yes, I do use them on occasion, but for the most part, I'm not a fan of worksheets when there are so many other ways to practice things like letter formation.  For a child who is here all four days of preschool, by the end of the week, they have practiced the letter so many times that the correct formation is a habit.  Today, we practiced D with sticks and curves-tracing with our finger, stamp and see-tracing with the magnet pen, letter formation playdough cards (see next picture)-tracing after creating the letter, K. wrote D's on her tongue twister page on her own after finding them in the sentence "Danny Duck and Daisy Dog did a dance." (ABC Twiggles).  Then she created a D out of the dominoes and trace that with her finger also.  And that is just today.  We do it that many times every day and by the end of the week, they know how to write the letter D correctly, without repeated writings/tracings on a worksheet.   Much more fun and it doesn't take the fun out of writing like I've seen happen with some children who are given worksheets all the time.  And believe me, they'll get plenty of that "meaningless" writing in Kindergarten.  And I only say meaningless because they write things over and over and over and over, wrong...because the teachers aren't catching the mistake at the beginning and correcting them and making them write it correctly.  Unfortunately, it has gone from Kindergarten to first grade the same way.  I'm quite disappointed, can you tell?! 

D is for Dough and D is for Donuts
As always, they have a task to do with the dough and then they are permitted to explore with the dough as they would like.  I love that picture on the right...she had so many expressions (verbal and facial) when she was making her donuts! 

All for now.  Tomorrow we are doing D is for Dinos.


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