Our PreSchool Blog

We read the book, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, during reading and writing workshop this week.  Our focus was learning about where the story took place, or the setting.  We discovered that this story took place in the habitat that we have been studying this month, the forest!  After reading it together, we used picture cards to retell the story, step by step.  After retelling the story, we created an illustration of the setting.  The students have been learning about what good illustrators do and how to create a more interesting picture by adding details, colors and words. They participated in their first Author’s Chair experience.  Author’s chair is a chance for students to share their work with the class.   They did an amazing job.  We have quite a few budding illustrators!

We will be focusing on retelling for the remainder of the month, during our reading workshops.  This is a great thing to do with your child after reading each day.  A simple retell (or what happened at the beginning, middle and end) of the story, helps build comprehension and teaches our children to become active readers.

Children become readers on the laps of their parents!

Happy October!  With the new month, we have introduced a new habitat in science: the forest.  The KPrep students have learned about different animals that can be found in the forest, specifically the great gray owl.  We have completed some fun forest themed art projects as well!

 We have introduced a new science discovery center in KPrep!  It is currently inspired by our forest habitat theme!  There are many natural forest items in the center, along with fun learning activities and thematic books!

What a fun week of math!  We have started a new “Number of the Day” activity that we have been completing during our first whole group meeting time.  This has taught the students about different ways to make a number!

The students practiced number recognition and counting by rolling a set of dice, counting the dots on the dice and feeding their tennis ball friend a chip with that number on it!  This game is  great for our fine motor skills and is fun too!

Since it is almost October, we made spiders using our math skills!  We matched up the number of dots on its legs to the numbers on its body.

We did a fun math/literacy lesson this week.  We read the book, “Chicka, Chicka, 1, 2, 3” as a whole group.  The book is about different numbers climbing up an apple tree.  It was only fitting that the kids would be able to snack on tasty, sliced apples during the reading!  Afterwards, in small groups the students  counted certain numbers of “apples” and used tongs to place them onto their felt apple trees! Another good fine motor activity!

We became authors and illustrators today during small groups.  The students came up with a sentence and illustration that they would add to I Jump (our reading group book  for the week) if we were the authors and illustrators.  The students learned that the text must match the illustration and that the dot at the end of each sentence is called a period!

Reading groups began in K Prep today!  Our very first sight words were introduced and we practiced reading them in our very first reader…I Jump by Bruce Larkin.  We will continue reading these books for the remainder of the week and practice recognizing our first sight words of the year.  New sight words are introduced every Monday/Tuesday.  Don’t forget, if you miss a day in K Prep, you miss a lot!

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The K-Prep class has been working so hard on their numbers and counting! This week we were able to count using some fun materials!

We counted beads onto pipe cleaners! This helped us practice some fine motor skills!

Because our science theme has been about ponds this month, we counted frogs onto lily pads!

We also sorted and counted yummy skittles. We even got to eat a few!

We have introduced a mailbox to our writing center!  Students have been practicing writing letters to friends in our classroom.  In small groups we all wrote a letter to home and took a walk to the post office next door to mail our letters!

This week the K-Prep class continued learning about numbers! We practiced counting (0-20), number formation, and putting numbers into the correct order.

We also read the book “Snappy Little Numbers”, which was a fun and interactive way to practice counting!

We are learning all about the pond habitat this month in K Prep!  This week we are learning about the life cycle of a frog.  We watched a video, worked together to put the stages in order, and then we even made our own frog life cycles!

Since we are learning so much about frogs, we of course had to have our very own tadpoles to watch as they go from tadpole to frog!  We learned that tadpoles have to live in the water just like fish and they breathe with gills!  We loved seeing them swim in their bowl.