F is for...

F is for Frogs!

One of our favorite types of books are "Sing and Read" Storybooks.  These are the books where an individual has illustrated a very common-popular song.  They love it when I sit down and play it on the piano also.   And I'll see them take the book and open it to the last page of the book where the notes are and pretend to play it at the piano. Always brings a big smile to my face!

So today our book was a Sing and Read storybook titled Five Green and Speckled Frogs beautifully illustrated (very entertaining) by Constanza Basaluzzo.

Here is a little manipulative I created about 6+ years ago.  The "log" has held up well.  It was an aluminum foil tube I'm pretty sure.  The frogs started out like the ones in front but over time they have fallen off and have gotten misplaced.  So this morning when I pulled it out of our frog theme tub, we just decided to tape on our wooden frog manipulatives.  They are taped onto wooden spoons.  I like to have the subtraction problem on a little card so they can start to connect what a formal subtraction problem looks like.  So 5-1= and they'll tell me 4.  4-1= and they'll tell me 3 and so on.

Making Learning Fun website:  www.makinglearningfun.com is a site I'm surprised I don't see more of a reference to on other's blogs.  They have a great many printables in so many themes!  Today we did a few of their fly count cards.  I like these types of cards as they add a nice fine motor component as we clip clothespins to the correct answer.  One challenge about these specific cards is that the flies are randomly above the frog, which makes the cards more visually appealing but makes it more difficult for a preschooler to count because they can't really go from left to right and top to bottom. 

We also did a color matching activity.  I find that I tend to just skim over colors for various reasons but I'm coming to see that there are some colors they just don't really know very well.  I tend to take the rule for sight word knowledge and use it for other basic concepts such as shapes, letters, numbers, colors and that is they should be able to tell you the answer within 4 seconds.  I find that it takes quite awhile for a few of them to come up with an answer so I'm being more diligent in slipping in simple color recognition activities throughout each week.  Here she is also matching the color word and then she used letter tiles to spell red, blue and yellow as those are the 3 colors on the pre primer sight word list.

In sensory, I provided some simple foam lily pads and our jumping frogs as an addition to water play.  I know I did water play the first week of school and this is only the third week but they've been asking and it goes very well with frogs and fish (tomorrow's theme).  The little banana split bowls came from a dollar store that was going out of business so a nice clearance buy.  T. was calling them his boats!  :-P

All for now!