Our PreSchool Blog

The very last vowel that we have been working on this month is the letter A.  Today, the children worked with the letter A in several ways.  They had the opportunity to write the letter, point out words that began with the /a/ sound, compare that capital and lowercase, along with creating their very own wooden letter A’s (that are at school drying!).  It was an A+ day!

Today, Ms. Courtney strengthened the children’s minds with our upper/lowercase letter match memory game.  The boys and girls picked some winners as they focused on each card that was flipped over.  What a great way to strengthen that memory muscle!

Today, the boys and girls really stretched their brains!  Each child rolled a die that had letters on each side.  The objective was to recognize the letter, letter sound, and think of a word that begins with that letter sound.  Our small group worked together to come up with words if our friends were stuck.  Here are some of the words we came up with:

Why is Mike so Messy?  We are focusing on the sight word THERE this week in our book, Messy Mike.  The story takes us through all the places our friend, Mike, leaves his banana peels.  The kids got a kick out this one and enjoyed it’s simple text which was a nice break from last week’s Buying Cheese.  It was a tough book for many of them, but they powered through it.

We have been building a folder of Africa Animals during writing workshop this month.  The children have been introduced to three new animals per week, watching a simple video clip of the animal in its habitat and learning interesting facts about them.  Writing Workshop is on Monday and Friday.  On Fridays, the children add the animals they have learned about during the week to their folder and get to collect their animal post card containing the facts we’ve learned.  The folder will be sent home at the end of the month of April.  They are doing an amazing job..they are fantastic writers!  Remember that “inventive” spelling is okay.  Encourage your child to listen to the sounds in each word as they say them and write those letters instead of spelling the words for your child.

For a GREAT article on inventive spelling click the first picture below.

We used our sight words to build safari sentences and then wrote the name of the unknown animal.  Building sentences helps us better grasp the concept of one to one correspondence when reading as well as the difference between letters and words.  It also helps us begin to recognize that there are spaces between words in written language.  We will be exploring this during reading groups this month as well.

We transitioned this month into using lines when writing.  We learned that all letters “sit” on the line with the exception of a few!  Ask your little one which letters “dig a hole.”  They are doing a fantastic job.  I’m amazed and so very proud of their progress in this area over the past few weeks.

Today we explored the letters of the alphabet! We played an uppercase/lowercase matching game  and hung our letters on a monkey clothesline. Playing games like these help letter recognition and understanding the alphabet in order.

During whole group this afternoon we continued to discuss Africa. We started with what we already know about Africa and listed everything we could remember from our study so far in April. Next we thought about what we were wondering about and what we still wanted to learn about the African savanna. Then we read a nonfiction book all about the continent and discussed new things we learned in the story. What an impressive chart the preschoolers made!

Our new letters this month are A, G and S.  G can be very tricky to write, and the short /A/ can be difficult to remember.  Using our multisensory approach, the children “built” each letter using our build a word materials, and then transferred that skill onto the chalk board while practicing our writing on our own.