Our PreSchool Blog

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.

How do we solve word problems in math?  Pictures of course…the children were introduced to word problems during our group time Math Minutes.  These will be introduced in Kindergarten as well and are one of the most challenging tasks for young mathematicians.  The key to solving math problems is to teach children strategies to solve them.  The first strategy will be drawing pictures, which we began today.  The second will be a math “sentence,” but I’ll leave that up to the Kindergarten and First grade teachers 🙂

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 went on an African safari during small groups and kept a record of the animals we found throughout the school.  We used our graph to explore an important math concept for Kindergarten…comparing sets…which animal did we find the most of?  Which animal did we find the least of?  Did we find more giraffes or more lions?  Did we find fewer zebras or fewer ostriches?

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!

We did coin rubbings today to discover the differences between the heads and tails of like coins.  Ask your child which coin worked the best!