Ocean Animals

We had a lot of fun during ocean animals week. Dramatic play was a beach, similar to what we had for our summer DP here. Except my cool trees lost their leaves, so no palm trees this time.

The kids were really into the fish toys and posters all over the room and were always asking what kinds of fish they all were. They loved racing the fish and chasing each other with the sharks too.

I have 3 ocean floor puzzles and we spent a lot of time on them this week. Puzzles are such a great skill for kids and they have a lot of fun putting them together and breaking them apart again.

We did a lot of math and number recognition this week too. These math puzzles from Lakeshore are some of my favorites that I have! I have a lot of them, and we've played with them before, so now they really knew how to use them when I got out the ocean ones. In order to see the picture, you have to put the numbers in order from 1-10. There's no fitting pieces into tricky spots or anything, just knowing your numbers and how to get them in order. I love that you can see right away if you got it wrong because the picture doesn't look right. We did these together several times, practicing our counting and naming the numbers. Number recognition is all about repetition, and this was great practice for us!

We did more math in large group with our new song, 5 Little Crabs. Instead of having the kids help hold the crab pictures, we had them on the board and them subtracted as the song went along. I already learned with 5 Little Monkeys that we're not quite ready to subtract ourselves and sit down-we want to hold a monkey the whole song! They did great with this activity and counting to 5! We also played a fish counting board game in large group where they picked a card, counted how many of that fish in the picture, then match the card to the picture. They did so great, they played it alone in self-select time the next week and all remembered how to play.

The highlight of the week was our growing sting ray. I love Dollar Tree! We measured it the first day, then put it in water. They were checking every few minutes and having me pull it out to compare to our first measurement. They were so sure he was growing by the second. Wednesday was a real treat because he had doubled in size and outgrew his jar! Weeks later, he's dried up and shrunk back down, and they still ask how he's doing!

Other fun things were eating our ocean in a cup, which was swedish fish in blue jello, and sewing with ocean lacing cards (an excellent fine motor skill). We also sang and danced to a lot of music! The kids have really enjoyed turning songs on during self-select time too and I love it!

Preschool Songs

With sending my daughter to nursery at church, I've realized how hard it can be to decipher the songs that she's learning there, and she's constantly asking me to sing them with her. When I know it, I can, but she gets frustrated when I don't. That being said, I thought this same thing could be happening to you parents, too. I write some of the lyrics on our newsletters, but that doesn't really help with the tune. We love watching some silly songs on youtube at our house, and I started searching for many of the songs we sing at preschool. My girl loved watching and singing along and I thought I'd share with you, so enjoy! I couldn't find them all, but here's what I found. Some are not sung by the same artists, but I found versions close to what we have sung in class so your child should recognize them!


Spider on the Floor:

Five Little Monkeys:

Tootie Ta

Five Green and Speckled Frogs

Dreidel Song (we'll learn it this month)

Back to blogging!

Sorry parents! I've been a little busy and distracted and have not been great at keeping you updated on our blog. I added a few new posts below, so scroll down and check them out.


This month is already flying by! After baby's arrival, we took a week off of school, then thanks to my wonderful husband, and a wonderful grandma, we were right back to school! We even added 2 new friends to our class! The kids have been amazing and done really well with our substitute teachers! I am so pleased with how well they've done at just sticking to their routine of school, and even how well they've adapted to the changes. I have felt so great after having this baby, I've actually joined the class each day to lead large group and it's been so much fun to get right back into teaching.

The first week back, we still had a foot of snow, so we changed the routine a little bit to have outside time last. This way, we weren't doing the snow gear thing all day! Even with 3 of us, it took about 10-15 minutes to get them all ready and outside! Because of this, we may only have outside time once a week when I'm back to teaching on my own. The kids loved playing outside in the snow, especially painting the snow with the colored water in squirt bottles! They had a lot of fun learning about farm animals. We played animal sound bingo, had stick horse races, and both Troy and Kerrie got down on their hands and knees and took the kids for horseback rides! We had to cancel our field trip because of the weather, but we'll just reschedule for the spring! We also played with farm puzzles and counting games. It was a great week!

 This week, the weather was great again, so we were back on a regular schedule. We had a super fun day, wrapping up our unit on farm animals, and also learning a little about Thanksgiving. We shook a bottle of whipping cream to make our own butter to put on crackers for snack. And thanks to our substitute "grandma," as all the kids call her, we also got to make ice cream that we enjoyed after playing outside. We sure are grateful for the cows who give us milk! We learned a little about Thanksgiving, made turkeys, and sorted Skittles by color on these turkey sorting mats. Well, to be honest, we ate a lot of Skittles. We'll continue to work on the sorting thing!
 
Our awesome substitutes will help out 1 more week after Thanksgiving, then back to me full time! Thanks for all your help and willingness to be flexible this month! Your kids are the best!

Halloween Week

Thanks to the late arrival of baby boy, we got to come to school the week of Halloween! We had so much fun, so I am so glad we were in school and that I got to be a part of it! Here are some of the fun things we did:

• The block area was turned into a giant spider web. Not all the kids were thrilled about this, but they warmed up to the idea! We had lots of bugs and spiders for the kids to play with, and I challenged them all to try to collect the bugs by staying on the web as they walked. It was a great activity for balance and their large motor skills. Also fun for the imagination! Many of these bugs also ended up in some tasty dishes in the kitchen!
• We made pictures with Halloween stamps and stickers in the writing center.
• We played with the squirrel pattern cards and apple and acorn counting trees from our week about fall. The kids loved having these back out!
• We read lots of spooky Halloween stories.
• We got dressed up for Halloween! Grandma Kerrie visited our class and played with us, read us books, and led a fun game of Halloween Bingo for large group time.
• We played in pumpkin guts!
• We acted out the story of The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat, and also learned a new song, Spider on the Floor by Raffi. We did the song over and over, they thought it was so much fun!

Pet Store

Here's the fun Pet Store we had for dramatic play the week we learned about pets:

There's just something about that cardboard box and cash register that is like a magnet to these kiddos! They just love it.
I think the highlight for me was the literacy and math I was able to pull in. All the animals had a sign for where they belonged, and then the signs for pricing were on the inside and outside of the "store" sign. They had a great time buying animals from each other and they would even check the sign to tell the customer how many dollars it cost. They don't all know all of their numbers yet, so I was able to help them. The best way to enhance number recognition is repetition, so I'm trying to incorporate a lot of numbers and counting into all the things we do to give them as many exposures as I can!
But the real highlight was watching the kids ring up the customers. The cash register's belt really moves and so the kids would put the smaller animals on the conveyor belt (like the frogs, and even the fish taken out of the bowls) and they'd push the button to move the animal along the conveyor belt until it beeped. It was so funny and cute to watch! Luckily, none of them work at a pet store yet.


The kids' highlight of the week was definitely one of our great moms bringing in their pet kitten. They are still walking about it, weeks later! What a cutie!

Animals

Just a little review of our fun times learning about animals.

We spent the last 2 weeks learning about wild animals, that live in the wild and aren't taken are of by people. We did a lot of math with sorting activities, such as putting animals into groups of wild, and not wild.

For dramatic play, we had a zoo the first week. The kids really loved working at the ticket booth. They loved writing out and selling tickets, and also selling and buying snacks. I overheard some pretty fun conversations back and forth. They were SO GOOD at sharing and taking turns here all week. I was so impressed there was no fighting over the cash register, but they took turns like champs instead. They got a lot of literacy in with their ticket writing, and also the animal signs. This helped them to clean up and sort the animals back into their cages too. The animals were also cared for well and all had a wide variety of food and snacks in their cages by the end of the day.

 

 
The second week, I changed dramatic play to a Veterinarian's Office. I forgot to take pics, but they had a lot of fun here too. Many stuffed animals spent their day getting shots and being wrapped in ace bandages. Poor things were taken care of very well.

The animal hats were a lot of fun in both dramatic play centers, and sometimes went with us outside too, where the kids could run and play like wild animals to their heart's content. It was great.

This is an "animal parade" a few of the kids built and put together one day. They all pitched in as they saw what the first child had done and had a great time. They cleaned up great too, and sorted the animals back to where they went in the zoo, according to their signs.

Another center they enjoyed was the lacing animals. Lacing and sewing cards are an excellent small motor manipulative for this age group. I have seen sturdy lacing cards at Dollar Tree lately and it's such a great quiet activity for a preschooler. I used to take these to my Sunbeams (3 year olds) class in church and they were great to keep them busy and quiet when needed. These ones I made from animal paper plates that you can get at any grocery store. I definitely recommend lacing cards at home!

This week we are learning about pets, and are learning the word "tame." We did some more sorting of animals, this time sorting them by wild and tame, to use our new word. We also made a Venn Diagram listing what animals would be good pets, or bad pets. They were all excited to share all they knew about their pets, or the pets of their grandparents. We even had a kitten visit our classroom and that was the highlight of the day! It's all they could talk about as we got backpacks ready to go home. We also did some great art, and had lots of fun playing in the pet store. I'll be back soon with more pictures from pet week!

Habitats

On week 2 of our Wild Animals unit, we are learning about animal habitats! This is a great video for your kids to help them review habitats at home. Have you noticed yet that I love Sesame Street? I just think it's a great show to help children learn vocabulary and other great things! I couldn't find the shorter videos, so here's the whole thing.