Our PreSchool Blog

We have been reading books from the amazing author, Mo Willems. There is so much we have learned from his writing and illustration techniques. We learned about speech bubbles, he uses them often in his texts. Another point of focus has been on Willems use exclamation points. When there is an exclamation point at the end of a sentence he makes the text really big. Or when a character is trying to be quiet, he makes the text much smaller. This small technique portrays a ton of emotions, especially to our young readers. They can tell that the character is really mad or excited if the text takes up the whole page, or they can tell if the character is sad if the text is written in a much tinier font.

Another major focus was the life lesson of friendships, how to be a friend and what that looks like. Willems role plays the thoughts and speech of friends throughout his books.

Mo Willems can also get a little sneaky with his techniques, when reading some of his literature that isn’t in the Pigeon Collection, sometimes if you look really closely you can find the Pigeon hanging out in some of his other books.

Each pic below is of each student with their favorite Mo Willems book!

We continued our animal exploration during reading groups this week as we reviewed many of the sight words we have been studying.  Do You Eat Grass? by Bruce Larkin is one of the many Bruce Larkin readers we use during reading groups throughout the school year that helps our young readers develop the skills they need to blossom into independent readers.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in words. We know that a student’s skill in phonemic awareness is a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty.  We have continued our study of phonemic awareness through the exploration of word families.  Our first word family of focus was the -at family.  After becoming familiar with our at family reader, the students enjoyed buddy reading throughout the classroom.  Reading and rereading text allows students to become more proficient in fluency and and have more practice with the reading strategies they have learned so far!

The Preschool and K Prep students have been reading variations of the Gingerbread Man all through the month of December.  The K Prep students have been comparing and contrasting the setting, characters and ending of each story.  Some of the books include:

My magic reading finger helps me learn how to read.  It helps make sure my mouth says what my eyes see.  When my finger’s under a letter, my mouth makes a certain sound.  It moves faster when I’m blending, for sounding out it must slow down.  For sight words it can HOP SKIP JUMP, these words I read with ease.  It covers up tricky parts, and makes looking for chunks a breeze.  This magic finger will help you, but there is one thing it please.  Keep the magic in the finger…by only using it to read!

-Jodi B. Whalen