F is for...

Here are a few end product pictures.

F is for feet!

Planned on putting a poem on the right side, that's why it's off center but I really couldn't find one that I liked that would fit in the space left and not look tacky so...if you all know of any great poems that would go along with a project like this...please let me know!  K. Sponge painted the white cardstock to make it look like sand.  Idea came from www.funhandprintart.blogspot.com.  It's the site where  I got most of my monthly handprint project ideas last year, where I put the child's picture on one side and we printed the handprint on the other.

F is for frog!

Which really ended up being a "toad"...which we have a few around here each summer in our sand box.  This idea was initially from The Mailbox preschool publication but I was reminded of it from Stacy at Share & Remember, http://shareandremember.blogspot.com.  Thanks Stacy! 

F is for Fold.

Ha!  Today is "Free Friday" where we finish up projects (I only have two children here besides my own on a regular basis on Friday), switch toys, do the things we didn't get to, etc.  I don't plan any new activities.  I have a habit of doing towels last and then leave them in the dryer until I do the next round of laundry.  Well, I emptied the towels from the dryer onto my bed and did my round of laundry for that day ending with towels.  We never got to the towels on the bed so I ended up putting them back into the dryer with the other load.  So I said to K. today, since she was really just following me around instead of playing, if she wanted to help me fold some towels, since F is for fold.  She got all excited and said "Yes!  I know how to fold towels!"  So she came with me and I grab the first armful to take it to the couch.  She walked in behind me and put her hands on her head and made a big exclamation when she saw how many towels there were!  My husband and I enjoyed that one!  She sure does know how to fold though! 

Last week we did mixing color pages throughout the week.  So we did L is for Lizard, L is for Lion, L is for Lollipop.  Here's the simple book (love my new binding machine!  Been keeping work here just so I can bind them in a book to send home!)

Front Cover:  They colored the paint brush their favorite color and cut the paint palette out if they were able.

2nd page:  the song we sing

3rd-6th pages are the two colors and the mixed color on the L picture we were focused on that day.  When we do activities like this I always allow for free exploration with the paints when they are completed with the task I asked them to do. 

 

 Have a good weekend!  Next week we move to the letter E.

F is for...

F is for Fish!

A listening activity we did today...

After exploring with the instruments (these are very familiar with the children enrolled now, we do quite a bit of rhythm instrument play) each child gets a school of fish that has a picture of an instrument.  I ran out of time so we didn't use the blue felt we normally do to make a sea for the fish.  :-)  I gather the instruments that are shown in the pictures and we go through each one talking about them and their sound (a lot of opportunities for vocabulary building).  Then I choose one of instruments, and without showing them the instrument I play the instrument and they guess which instrument it is.  This sounds like a really easy activity but I find it's more of a challenge for the preschool children then one would think! 

 Upper-Lowercase Letters

Three times a year I do an assessment.  The first two weeks we matched shapes- upper to upper and lower to lower case letters. I was able to see which letters they remembered from last year, if they knew their sound and if they could give me a word that began with that sound.  I had planned to use the shapes again, doing the upper-lower case but they had lost interest so I decided to wait until today and pull out this activity I printed from www.childcareland.com.  Simply, they took the lower case letter square and placed it next to the capital letter on the fish.  I had never gotten around to using velcro with this activity, though that is what was the directions, I just used sticky tack.  However, I will say that using velcro adds a component of interest, especially when it comes to taking the letters off for the next child.  I've not met a student once that doesn't like to work with velcro!

Handwriting Without Tears

We'll be using this tool each week to reinforce the letters we have learned or are learning.  I also try to incorporate a little simple sign language because it's great for developing those small muscles in their hands. Can be quite a challenge as we can see in the second picture...but that's just fine.  It's where he is at.  Though they'll attend Kindergarten the same year...there are months between them as well as varied experiences and gender plays a role also.   One thing I will say though, with the 15 years I've been in this field, I would definitely be an advocate for our State's Kindergarten cut off date to be moved to Sept 1.  Or even a bit earlier in the summer.  Those few months make a BIG difference in a child's school readiness.  There are some exceptions, I agree, but in general, children that are well into year 5 have a much better success rate then those just turning or will turn during the fall.  A lot of it boils down to social emotional and fine motor readiness.  Again, my opinion.  Take it or leave it!  :-)

Fine Motor

I made this fish last year and they were very excited to see it out again.  And, for those who notice, T. has the bowl on the right side of the tray for a reason.  :-P  He's left handed and I really wanted to encourage crossing the midline.  The other children had their bowl on the left.  FYI:  a 1/4 teaspoon is perfect for transferring a marble. 

ABC Twiggles

As I mentioned last week with our L is for Llama, we are creating an alphabet book that uses the patterns from Kidssoup/ABC Twiggles.  Children cut the sticks/curves and glue onto the paper to create an object that starts with that particular letter.  I also encourage them to write the letter in our simple ____ is for ______. sentence and find all the letters in that sentence.  You'll see a lot with capital letters, I do use lower case letters also, but for letter formation I'm following the Handwriting Without Tears  program and their research shows that children can create the capital letters easier (and I agree or I wouldn't be following the program).  However, with reading, the majority of the letters are lowercase so that's where we do our lowercase work...with reading/letter recognition activities.

Hope your week went well!

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!

F is for...

F is for Fire!

Today started with smile (well, by the time the kids woke up) and the morning ended with a smile.  It was a lovely morning!  Of course, part of it is finding a "theme" that the children really are interested in and anything with fire, firetrucks, firemen, etc is always a hit.  As you know, this year I'm doing theme days in accordance to the focus letter of the week.  There is one downfall though...I often can't fit into one day what I could in a week!  Oh, well, we'll just see how it goes.  Perhaps we'll find the "middle place" in it all. 

Well, what to share.   Hmmm.  All of it?  Probably not.  But I'll start and see where I get.  Here's a little rhyme I found last week.  And for the life of me, I can't find the site where I found it.  Anyway...if anyone knows where they've seen something similar, please let me know so I can give proper credit!  Thanks.

The children took to this rhyme very quickly!

Rhyming, left to right progression, words vs. pictures and more!

I had a doll house out for dramatic play this week and so I also brought out the Ryan's Room Fire Station and put it across the room.  Cut out a few foam flames (which we also added to our water play, with spray bottles and plastic fire hats) and they, of course, stuck them to the house and the fire truck rushed over to put out the fire.  Great addition!  Lovely conversations taking place!

We started out with blow painting red and yellow watered down paint, for art, but then ended with a small paintbrush as we were having a bit of trouble having success.  :-)  The saliva was starting to win!  LOL

  Our Lakeshore Transportation manipulatives are always a favorite and you don't have to use them just for counting and sorting.  Here we created Ls and Fs because those are the two main letters we worked on but here you can see that K made a zero, and was quite proud of it.  They naturally pattern and sort though, because that's what we've done in the past.  Like most activities, I have a small "task" and then they have free exploration of the materials.  That's what happened here also.

Here's a cute little idea I found today!  Wish I had thought of it earlier (or found it earlier) but that's fine, I'll make something similar for the other transportation manipulatives that we have.

http://simply-mari.blogspot.com/2008/11/fire-truck-unit-activities.html

Other great ideas their also!

Scissors:  cutting out the hydrant.  Great conversation here also!  Idea was from

http://www.brighthub.com/education/early-childhood/articles/122484.aspx

Love the purple hydrant!  Also, encouraging a dictation sentence is always beneficial in helping with learning print concepts.

I guess I better stop here as time is a-flying!  Hope your morning ran smoothly!

F is for...

F is for Feet!

We focused on the 'leapfrog letter' F today.  I really wanted to share K's journal page today.  We read The Foot Book by Dr. Seuss and the sentence on the page read, "There are _____ feet in my family."  Couple things to note in the picture.  1) She drew them like Mat Man.  See how she started out with a rectangle body on mom?  And the feet on all but her sister are sticks.  Interesting!  She never used to draw ears but note the curves on either side of the head on mom and dad.  2) They are holding hands.  First it was mom/dad because they were married.  Then brother L. because he was part of the family.  And then she was holding hands with her last drawing of a person who has "really long legs because she's my BIG sister.  She stated that she was holding hands with her sister because she loved her.  I love it when they are drawing and talking at the same time!  I also observed that only her self portrait has hair.  She made a point to say it was short hair also.  FYI:  She got her hair cut just before school started.  Guess it made a big impression on her!  :-) 

Sensory today was a little different.  We first started out by reviewing that F is made out of 1 long stick and 2 short sticks and that this was a leapfrog letter where we do a line down and jump back up to the top to draw the short sticks.  So I helped them create a foot print F by having them do a heel to toe walk and then helping them "jump" back up to do the sticks.  Then, of course, we got a fresh paper to explore with!  This is always a favorite.  I suggest 1:1 or 1:2 children only at a time as it does get slippery!  Having a tub of soapy water and a towel nearby helps with quick cleanup and having a chair near where they are getting fresh paint is very helpful with their balance.  This time I just put the paint on paper plates and let them paint. 

Our scissors today came from the Kumon scissors work book.  Added a little literacy by having them come up with a name that starts with F (which is really hard for them so I started naming a few and let them choose) and I wrote the sentence "Francis Fox has four fine feet!" and encouraged F finding.  I do not use the Kumon Cutting work book in order as it's meant to be but if you are looking for a simple work book that is progressive...this is a nice book.  You can get it at Meijer, Target, Wal-Mart, Barnes and Noble and others similar places.  http://www.amazon.com/First-Book-Cutting-Kumon-Workbooks/dp/4774307084/ref=cm_cmu_pg__header#_

I'm not sure about you all, but I find that most of my students will not choose puzzles on their own and there are quite a few benefits to puzzles so I try to slip them in when I can.  I chose this puzzle today, obviously it was theme related, but also to reinforce number recognition and numerical order.

We also did a Jumping Graph.  I placed a piece of felt in the middle of the room and she decided what she was going to jump to and we counted the jumps.  Then together we transferred the information to a graph and talked about which took more jumps and which were equal and so on.

Oh, and last week we marble painted leaves and I said I'd show a picture of the completed mobile.  Sorry, the picture isn't all that great but here is the one I snapped.

A little different approach then just cutting and gluing to paper.

Have a great week!

Sight Word Booklets

I find that repetition is the way to go, when learning sight words.  Really, how else are they going to learn?  They must be able to see and interact with them over and over.  Try just a few at a time and introduce an additional one as your child begins to learn the others.  Cute little comment K. made to me on Thursday when we created the L is for Llama project was "Ms. Amber, you need 'look'.  That was the main sight word I introduced this week.  That comment put a big smile on my face, and of course we added the word 'Look' to her paper!  :-)

This past week we did three little booklets to go along with our focus letter L and the sight words look, 1, 2, 3, and red, yellow, blue. 

The first day we read the book called Lizard's Home and did a few activities about lizards.  So K's booklet said:

Look, a red lizard.

Look, a yellow lizard.

Look, a blue lizard.

And the last page was a little info page about lizards.

We had already introduced red, yellow, and blue.  So the goal was to introduce her to the word 'look' as well as 'a' and then she colored each lizard and glued the corresponding color word into the sentence.

Day two, we did quite a bit with lions.  So her booklet read:

Look, one yellow lion.

Look, two yellow lions.

Look, three yellow lions.

And the last page was a little lion fact sheet.

This time she matched the number words and found the word yellow.  I also created it so that it was a male, female and cub lion by the time she got to the three lions.

And the third booklet was about leaves. 

Look, one red leaf.

Look, two yellow leaves.

Look, three blue leaves.

The last page was a fall leaf identification picture.

This day I had each of the words of the sentence cut apart and mixed together.  She arranged them on the tray by putting the word 'look' together, number words together, color words together and leaf/leaves words together.  Then she glued them to create a sentence. 

These little booklets I was able to create quickly in Print Shop.  I googled specific coloring sheets to get my black and white images. 

Came across a cute sight word activity last night that will fit in quite nicely to plans for next week.  Can't wait to share it with you and tell you how it goes! 

L is for...

L is for Llama!

Each week, as we focus on a letter, we plan to do a letter paper craft like the one above.  At this point I believe I'll use the suggestions at www.abctwiggles.com where the L is for Llama pattern came from.  I plan to bind them together in a book after we do each capital letter.  It's a nice little review of sticks and curves, letter formation, and the sound it makes. 

L is for Lunch!

Shape Monster

Shape monster, shape monster

Munch, munch, munch.

How about a(n) orange oval for your lunch. 

Last verse:

Shape monster, shape monster

Munch, munch, munch.

Hope you enjoyed your shape lunch!

We just slipped this little rhyme into our week.  Initially I planned to have read Lion's Lunch but I was unable to get the book from the library so we didn't.  But it is a cute little chant that the children pick up quickly and seem to enjoy.  I do not know where I got this pattern and chant from.  If anyone knows, please let me know so I can give them credit.  Thanks.  I colored and printed the monster and shapes, laminated and put a piece of velcro (hook side) on the back so it would stick to the flannel board.  Actually, I've always used felt or magnet for these type of things and this is the first time I've actually used velcro, though I've heard about it for years.  Well, I'll tell you what...velcro works VERY nicely! 

Busy day today so I'll stop with those couple of activities.