Our PreSchool Blog

We started our class book today, All About the Farm.  We’ve been learning what it means to be a good author and illustrator and now we’re putting it into practice!  We completed the cover and page number one.  We’ll continue working on it through the week then read it to the young 3’s in Ms. Ann’s Class when we’re finished.  We can’t wait!

Learning the letter N and associating it with words and names we already know was very exciting today.  While tracing the shape of the letter with our finger, we learned the sound that the N makes, and discussed items that begin with the letter N, such as nose, no, noise, note and newspaper.  Using a glue stick, the children traced the N again, then tore newspaper to glue onto the N (excellent fine motor practice!).  Some children remembered that they have the letter N in his/her name!

We practiced our words from the farm today as a sneak peak into our theme for November.  These dry erase cards and markers will be available to the students in the writing center during Pre-K classes.  We practiced how to use the materials and clean them up when we are done.  What will we find on the farm this month?

Names come in all different sizes.  Long names are no easy task.  However, recognizing letters that children already know helps make what can be a tedious process seem more manageable.  Today we discussed how letters start from top to bottom, and left to right.  We also pointed out letters we already knew.  A difficult letter (and very common!) is the lowercase e.  In preschool, we make an exception in teaching how to write lowercase letters when it comes to names.  Writing names in all capitals is a very bad habit to get into!

When learning our letter sounds, it is important to make connections between the written letter and the sound it represents.  These letter-sound connections create the foundation for young readers.  While learning the letter R, the children were able choose different colored roller painters.  While rolling out the letter R, Ms. Lori talked about things that begin with the letter R, such as rollers and rainbow.

Most lowercase letters are a smaller version of their uppercase counterpart.  But, there are some lowercase letters that look completely different than their uppercase version.  Some lowercase letters look similar among themselves (q, p, b, d) which makes decoding difficult.  We worked on fine tuning our ability to recognize uppercase and lowercase matches as well as their sounds.  They did a great job!

In small groups today, Pre-Kers combined Math and Literacy as we listened for and identified the initial sounds in words.  Then sorted them by initial sounds.  Hearing each sound in a word is just as important as being able to identify each letter in a word.  Being able to hear each sound prepares students for both reading and writing.  You can practice this skill in a very informal way…traveling to and from school, during bath time, or at the dinner table.  Super easy to make into a game, have fun with it!