D is for...

D is for Dogs!

Dog's Colorful Day by Emma Dodd

This is one of our favorite books, even my older school-age children enjoy it. 

www.makinglearningfun.com

A great interactive board.  I chose to use the pattern to create a felt dog and felt spots and velcro on the backs of the other pieces.  I didn't have my head on straight and I put the loop side of the velcro on the numbers and it would have been more beneficial to put the hook side on the numbers so I could have put the numbers up on the felt board also...but it worked out just fine :-)  Could be done with magnets also!  Or just plain, without magnets or velcro.

Pencil Control Binder created with a set of pencil control sheets from www.sparklebox.co.uk

I have found a lot of great free printables from this site.  The only downfall is that they use a different font than I do.  Most of the time it works out just fine but just an FYI if you are using the basic "ball and stick" font.

 www.abctwiggles.com

K. wanted to write her own "D is for dog."  Yeah!  I've been waiting for this.  And as she made the period at the end of the sentence she started to sing, "punc, punc, u-ation"  A LeapFrog song.  :-P  Watch out Kindergarten Teachers! 

Paper Bag Puppet

www.dltk.com

We chose to add colorful foam circles to make it more like the dog in the book.

Of course, we must do Do a Dots during our D week.  Unfortunately, MANY of my pictures I took yesterday were blurry.  Not sure why as I had it on the same setting as I always do.  Anyway, we started with the task of forming Dd with do a dots on an ABC Twiggles sheet then had a free exploration time.  This time, T., 2, matched the lids to the correct color on the bottles each time telling me what color it was.  Love that he's starting to name colors correctly!

D is for Dirt. 

And, the kiddos here know quite well that dogs like to dig in dirt. Actually, we have two fresh holes in our yards from last night.  Good thing our Golden Retriever 'puppy' is cute!  LOL  He's about a year old but "full-size" and our yard didn't look all that grand before we got this dog but oh my goodness, the holes in our yard now.  Where does the dirt go?  We scrape it back in but it never fills up the hole!  Anyway, I added some rocks yesterday that we picked up from Lake Huron.  I wanted to introduce them now and I'll pull them back out in a couple weeks when we do the letter R.  When we picked them, we picked them when they were in the water, so their patterns/colors are really cool.  So we'll add eyedroppers/water/magnify glasses and so on the next time they come out.

Hope you all had a great week...on to letter P next week.  :-) 

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.

www.kizclub.com

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.