Phonics and Field Trips!

We are now almost half way through our alphabet! Your children are hopefully starting to recognize both the sight and the sound of the first 12 letters. We are going to keep reinforcing this recognition through our hands on centers. The one below we are matching uppercase to uppercase letters. This can be done at many different levels. Everyone can work at their own pace. The kids that already know their letters well decided to not only match the letters, but to do them it in alphabetical order.

We talked about the letter L this week. We used our big straight lines, and our little straight lines to make our L's.

We used our imaginations to create our own fall pictures by cutting, tearing, and gluing strips of paper. 

We found hidden alphabet letters in our sand table. Then, we used our alphabet mat to sort them. The kids were enjoying finding the letters in their own name.

We talked about size comparisons this week. These miniature items were sorted by small, medium, and large.

AND

We had our field trip to Garnder Village! We successfully found the 16 witches and the weather was cold, but at least we made it before the snow!

The favorite witch? None other than Witchy Poo herself, of course!

Mark celebrated his 5th birthday this last week. Happy Birthday Mark!

Pumpkins!

is for 

Jack-o-lanterns! We talked about the letter J this week. We had Jello jigglers in the shape of a J that we practiced tracing with our finger, and then we ate of course! How appropriate for our pumpkin theme! The kids used the shapes above to design their jack-o-lantern faces like jack-o-lantern card that they chose.

 They also decorated their own silly sticker pumpkins.

We talked about how pumpkins start as a seed, then the leaves start growing, then the green pumpkins appear, and finally we have our orange pumpkin. For this math center we put the seeds in their pumpkin according to the corresponding number on the page. If they couldn't recognize the number by sight, they could count the stickers to know how many seeds to use.

We made size comparisons with our pumpkins and our unifix cubes. We built our unifix cubes as tall as the pumpkins, and then counted how many unifix cubes tall each pumpkin was.

We practiced writing our names with pumpkin seeds! 

We also talked about more, less, or the same. We used pumpkins of course! We compared small pumpkins, candy pumpkins, and pumpkin seeds.

The Mon.-Wed. (Tues.-Thurs. on Fall break) class also got to play pumpkin zingo. We changed it up from the regular zingo game in that instead of having to collect the zingo markers by calling out first, they were ALL able to take a pumpkin and cover their picture and the person who filled  their 

sheet first was the winner.

Smile! We had a great week!

Book of the week: Spookley the Square Pumpkin by Joe Troiano

Songs:

5 Little Pumpkins

Five little pumpkins

Sitting on a gate

The first one said,

"Oh, my, it's half past eight!"

The second one said,

"There are witches in the air!"

The third one said,

"Good folk, beware!"

The fourth one said,

"We'll run and run and run!"

The fifth one said,

"Let's have some fun!"

OOOOOOOH, went the wind

And OUT went the light

And the five little pumpkins

Rolled out of sight.

and

Orange Song

(tune of wheels on the bus)

The pumpkins on the vine are orange, orange, orange,

Orange, orange, orange. Orange, orange, orange.

The oranges on the tree are orange, orange, orange.

O-R-A-N-G-E.

Happy Birthday this week to Braxton!

Our field trip to Gardner Village is coming up! Please watch for the details on where to meet and what time coming home Monday and Tuesday in your child's backpack!

Fall is in the air

We will be ready for our Thanksgiving feast with this Fall leaves placemat! We used real leaves of all sizes for these leaf rubbings and then laminated it with contact paper to catch our spills!

I spy with my little eye, all things meant for fall! One center we visited this week was an I spy picture filled with mini things of all seasons. The kids would choosse a card from the table and try to find that item in their picture.

MMM, the apples are so crisp, sweet, and yummy this time of year! Our apples didn't taste good, but they looked good! We had an apple math center where we placed as many apples on the tree as it said on the basket below the tree, and then picked them and put them in the basket.

And, we had an apple alphabet center where we matched uppercase letters to their lowercase counterpart.

We used our fine motor skills to string fall colored Apple Jacks cereal onto our string necklaces. (BTW, did you know that they even have red apples clones in the mix now?) Perfect to show fall colors such as green, red, and orange.

We worked a lot on patterns this week. We did AB patterns, AABB patterns, and the kids made up a few of their own as well. The pattern mats below gave us clues to help us finish the pattern, and then we used our fall patterned stampers to create our own patterns.

The stamps were fall colors and included fall items such as brooms, rakes, leaves, and trees.

We made some more leaf rubbings with tin foil and sponges. You have to press pretty hard to get the impression to show so we used our muscles!

We have learned letters A-I up to this point. We had each letter mat out and the kids practiced putting them in alphabetical order.

We also had our dry erase uppercase and lowercase letters out for the latest 3 letters, G,H, and I. 

And, we are getting ready for Halloween! We decorated our bulletin board to get in the spirit.

Book of the week: Mouse's First Fall by Lauren Thompson

Song of the week: Leaves poem 

and

Oh, I See Leaves

(tune of Pop goes the Weasel)

Now that it is cooler outside

The trees are full of color

When I go for a fall walk

Oh, I see green leaves.

(Repeat with other fall colors red, orange, yellow, brown)