"Over in the Meadow" Felt Board Story

We are studying the weather changes that come in the spring, including the animals coming out when it starts to get warm. So, I decided to read the book Over in the Meadow and made some felt board animals to along with it. This book is great for counting and rhyming and learning about what different animals do. 

Transition Board

Here is a transition board we are using this year to transition from large group to the next activity, usually going outside.  First, we will put the names of all the kids who are at school today on the hand prints. Then, we will have a child use the pointer to count how many girls and how many boys are here at school today and put the number up on the board.

What are you using to transition this year?

Puzzle Piece Names

Another one of our small groups for "All About Me." We had the children spell their names with these puzzle alphabet stickers identifying each letter as they go. We had their name strips with each child's name pre-written on it for them to look at to help them find the letters.  Some of the younger children just wanted to stick random letters everywhere, so we let them do their thing. When they are more ready for this activity, we will try again.

Then we had them count how many letters in their name. As an extension of this, you can have the children graph how many letters their names have and compare whose name has more or less. 

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Study about Cars

We did a car study with the afternoon class a few weeks ago. Here are some of our activities.

These are some streets we made with construction paper in the shape of letters. They can be put together to make different paths and then they drove matchbox cars around it.

We read this book...

and the kids loved this page about the tunnel. Some of them decided to build their own tunnel.

They used the train table lid as a ramp.

Then they went to work building the tunnel at the end.

When the tall one would not stay up easily, I suggested that they build a shorter one.

They had lots of fun racing the cars down the ramp and through the tunnel. As you can see, we also got out some measuring tools and measured and compared the distance each car went when it reached the bottom of the ramp. We predicted whether the big cars or the little cars would go further.

Here are the felt cars I made and below is the chant we did, starting with one car and adding one for each verse.

Here is the source where I got this poem.

We did a graph of our favorite car...

And lastly, I don't have a picture, but we glued red, yellow and green circles on a black rectangle to make traffic lights.

Here are some of the books we read:

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Quantifying and Number Stamps

quan·ti·fy [verb] to determine, indicate, or express the quantity of.

Good old quantifying, one of our friendly math objectives. How do we teach this to preschoolers? Well, we started out with having the children put a button on each flower (to go along with our plant study). As they put each one on, they counted it. So, not only are they counting, but they are counting objects (1:1 correspondence), quantifying (indicating the quantity), and representing the amount with a number symbol. And they just thought they were playing a game!

We had more of these cards all the way up to the number 20.

Then to reinforce the number symbols, we had the children use number sponges and paint to make prints on their paper. We asked them to identify the numbers as they were stamping. Here are some photos of what we did.

 

The kids had lots of fun with this and made a much smaller mess than I had anticipated! 

Here are some books about numbers and counting (and one about comparing sizes: The Best Bug Parade) that might also be helpful.

Happy quantifying!

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Thinky Linky Thursday

The most viewed link from last week's Thinky Linky is...

Criss-Cross Applesauce's Let it Snow Marshmallows FREE Math Game Numbers 1-20

Congratulations again to Criss-Cross Applesauce for winning 2 weeks in a row! Everyone needs to get your links in early this week and give CCA some competition! :)

Thanks to all who entered!

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Fingers, Toes and Homes around the World

Today I read this book to my class. I have done a previous post about this book, but here are some more details about how we used it in class.

First we did a small group that consisted of using these felt board fingers and toes to count to 10.

Then we took off our socks and shoes to count our toes. Yep, we all had 10 :)

We have also started learning about homes around the world. Here is our sensory table filled with materials for building a house. We got into questions such as what are houses made of, what are the parts of a house, how do you build a house, why are houses different around the world, what is the purpose of a roof? The children had some good answers and seemed like they were becoming interested.

He said this was an apartment :)

Hammering the pieces together.

I introduced a lot of new vocabulary such as carpenter, hinges, plaster, door frame, etc. I am beginning to see that there is so many directions this study could go. We had planned to go into weather around the world next week, but we may stretch out homes for another week. Can't wait to do some more of the activities we have planned for this week. Stay tuned!

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Storytime Sunday: More Farm

Ok, I know I have been a slacker this weekend. It is technically Monday when I am posting this. Please forgive me. Anyways, we have been studying pets and farm animals the last few weeks. I have been getting the idea that there were still a few things my kids were not understanding about the farm. For example, they know about specific animals and barns, but I'm not sure if they know about what a real farm looks like and the names for some of the baby animals. Here are some books I found in my personal library that I thought would be helpful for them.

This story is great because it explains in detail what the farm looks like and what all the animals do on the farm. It tells about the sounds the animals make and some things that grow in the fields. It has colors, counting, and rhyming and it goes through the whole day from morning to night. There are a lot of descriptive words and vocabulary.

Next is a book about a boy who lives on a farm in Mexico and takes care of the animals. I especially love this one because it is going to be an awesome transition into our study about countries and cultural diversity. It has some simple words in Spanish and tells 5 stories about different animals and each one has a riddle that Ramon makes up about the silly actions of the animals. I know the children will love this one!

A very simple book with large print and very few words, this tells the name for each adult and baby animal.

And last is a simple reader that introduces the sight words "a, big and little" and other words "chair, sheep, three and white." Kids will enjoy reading this all by themselves!

HAPPY READING!

Animals from Recycled Materials and More!

Here is what we did to set up our vet and continue our pets/animals study. 

First we made signs and hung them up.

 Then we pretended to be vets and fix up the animals.

 In the sensory table, we added cotton balls, bandaids made from felt, tweezers, and tongue depressors to take care of sick animals as well.

 We painted a box as a dog house.

 But, in the end, we decided we needed it more than the dog...

To extend the pet store that we have been working on the past several weeks, we put price tags on the animals that were for sale and used the cash register and play money to buy them.

And, for our last project, we painted and decorated recycled materials to make animal sculptures.

TIGER

TURTLE

LADYBUG

BIRD

SNAKES

I love this one, the little boy was determined to get the legs to stay on, but school glue just wasn't cutting it, so I got out the hot glue gun :)