Christopher Columbus

• Look for our continent song to soon be added to the my time and more preschool you tube page
  

How many oceans are on earth?

Although the oceans of the earth are all connected and truly one "World Ocean," most often the world is divided into four major "oceans" - the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Arctic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean.

Some consider there to be five oceans - the fifth being an ocean surrounding Antarctica called the Antarctic Ocean or Southern Ocean.

For our song, we only mention the 4 four oceans but please note the children may be introduced to 5 oceans.

In addition, we will sing this Christopher Columbus song today (see link below) as it does a great job introducing some facts about this historical sailor and explorer.

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=christopher+columbus+songs+for+preschoolers+you+tube&mid=90DE9653F9E2C0AAE6D690DE9653F9E2C0AAE6D6&view=detail&FORM=VIRE6

Here is some more information about Christopher Columbus:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/famouspeople/standard/columbus/learn/page03.shtml#focus

Since we only meet once a week, we can only do so much during class time. Here is a link for extra activities to do at home if you wish, about Christopher Columbus:

More activities for home:

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/explorers/page/c/columbus.shtml

Are we there yet?

K was for kite as the preschoolers traced a diamond shape, cut out their kite and added details like a yarn tail with triangle bows and fluffy cotton ball clouds. We also continued our "preschool city" collage and added some stop lights with red, yellow and green circle added to the tan rectangles and also red octagons as stop signs. Students also added squares with triangle tops for houses. We will continue to add more shapes and details to our preschool city map.

We worked on right and left with a game outdoors. We held hands in a straight line and stepped either right, left, forward or reverse. After practicing that a bit, we gave directions on how to get from one side of the yard to where we could touch the trampoline. We tried 10 steps forward, then 5 more steps forward, then 1 step in reverse, then 5 steps to the left and then - viola we reached the trampoline where we could touch it with an outstretched hand. Try this game at home. Have your child stand in the kitchen and guide him/her to the front door. Then have you stand by the refrigerator and have your child give you directions to the tv. At quiet time/naptime, hide a special treasure and write out the directions from your child's bedroom door to the secret hiding spot. Give him/her the written directions and read it together as s/he discovers the special surprise :)

Learning is a journey and there is so much to explore. We will be continuing this "Explore our World" theme as students get introduced to continents, the oceans, a globe, directions, a compass, Christopher Columbus, The United States and even Arizona and San Tan Valley.

Pictures!!!

Thanks Ivonne for coming to take our class picture, individual picures and a few candids. This preschool age is so much fun. I am so glad you were able to capture a few smiles of the bright, curious and amazing children I get to spend my Tuesdays with for a few precious hours!

Ivonne Ramirez-Carlton has started a new photography venture, Candid Moments Photography. Contact her for a great introductory offer. With the holidays around the corner, now is the perfect time to take advantage of this great offer. To view a small sample of her work and for more details, please visit her website at http://www.facebook.com/l/jAQFHCnURAQGeclgTaknBaz0s7cNP2PJn8hVQsD_WEdESZg/www.candidmomentsaz.com. If you're interested in booking a session please contact her at ivonner1979@msn.com or via her website.

Explore our world

Explore our World is our current theme for preschool. We are learning about how the Earth is round, we are looking at globes (even playing catch with a beach ball globe!), looking at maps, making a pretend map and much more.

Each class time we also go on a treasure hunt complete with a map of the backyard & playground where students find the numbers 1-7 hidden in spots that coordinate with the map. They turn in their numbers for a tresure of the day from the treasure box.

We are singing about the 7 continents and will be also learning another ocean song. We will be introduced to a United States map and Arizona map as well.

For fall fun, we painted pumpkins and finished them with glitter - they turned out so cute! We also read about Spookley the square pumpkin and made our own unusual shaped pumpkins. We did an activity to practice rhyming words and have started to use nursery rhymes and our favorite stories as part of our puppet theater.

Children brought in mystery items (starting with a previous letter of the day)and gave 3 clues for the other children to guess the mystery object for show and tell for October. It has been a busy month!

We also took a class picture! Look for the pictures to be in a finished format soon. Thanks Ivonne for taking them!

Picture Day - this FRIDAY!

Ivonne has agreed to take our preschool pictures. YAY! I am planning to have our class picture and an individual picture of your little learner on our first FUN Friday in October. That is THIS Friday! No cost to you...just send your usual adorable child and a big smile :) We will take pictures in the beginning part of class so their hair/outfit can be "just right" for you.

In the meantime, here are a few past pics from some recent explorations. Students investigated how tall in blocks they were, stacking the blocks independently to an impressive tower as high as they were tall.

Students covered up the letter "r" in masking tape on the carpet with small blocks.

Students wrote the lowercase "r" on the easel.

Students explored the magnetic tell your own story book about transportation.

Some students matched clothes pins with letters on each one to the correct corresponding letter on the letter strip.

Looking ahead for fall

October and November will have many opportunities for history and geography themes. We will introduce the globe, maps including the United States, the American Flag and saying the Pledge of Allegiance, Christopher Columbus and the first Thanksgiving.

Things to look forward to in October include new labels in the classroom (door, table, bathroom, etc) and a race against the clock game to go with the labels. We will also bring out the puppet theater as we get ready to add more core stories every preschooler/kindergartner should know.

Show and tell for October will involve you helping your child make a book/draw a picture of states she/he remembers visiting and what he/she did there (or add some photos). You may also include a list or picture of family or close friends who live in another state. We will add these important adventures and people to a class map and use the homemade books in a book nook. If you have friends in other states, contact them over break and ask them to mail you a postcard from their state to add to our class book.


I also hope to take time from our busy schedules to meet with you to share more about your child's progress and discuss how we can work together to achieve the goals you have set with your child this year.

I remind everyone (especially the pre-kinders) to keep practicing the letter rings. 5-15 minutes a day of attention from you where you can work on the sound(s) each letter makes is an invaluable pre-reading skill. Your little star will be reading phonic words and phonic/site word stories before you know it!

Some parents have been curious which letters of the day are around the corner. I plan to teach the following sequence which will lead us through October and November: b, h, k, d, v, j, e

I remind you to check out my links and favorites on my blog for great websites to reinforce phonic sounds including starfall.com and my you tube page which will have our class abc chant updated as well as short clips of the phonic sounds including the upcoming ones.

Free time and friends

During activity of choice time, students are starting to invite each other to play with them. On the playground, children are playing in the sand together or finding a friend to go on the teeter totter. Inside, they are playing baby dolls together, pretending to cook delicious meals or even starting a game of the "Lion Sleeps Tonight."

As part of our transporation theme, the students also got to try out the remote controlled Jeep. They had fun trying to control its path which has one lever for forwards and backwards and another for left/right. It might be a good thing they need to wait another 12-13 years to get their driver's permit :)

s is for super!

We recently had s as the letter of the day. I wanted to include a few pictures and comments from our learning that day.

For snack a student brought a rainbow fruit kabob platter. It was so pretty that most children tried all the fruit! There were yummy go-gurt for everyone too.

Some children chose to make a snake for the letter "s." Oters worked on tracing a stencil and making horizontal parallel lines to "color" in the "s"tar or the "s"top sign which is a great pre-writing activity and fine motor skill. Others tried lacing a "s"tar. Some searched for the letter "s" in the sand. They also did some "rainbow writing" using at least 3 different colors to trace the shape of "s" on a laminated writing sheet.

SNL - live from San Tan Valley...

...It's silly spiders, nightengale nests and lollipop lions! As I look over our last three preschool class, I noticed our last letters have been SNL. Just a funny coincidence, although at times kids can be quite entertaining!

We have started our transporation/travel theme for September. We are learning the Spanish as well as the ASL signs for car, bus, helicopter, bicycle and more. I will be updating the you tube page with a catchy little tune this week.

Last class we listened to the famous "Little Engine That Could" story. As I read, children held my feeling plate face to show either a happy smile or a sad frown depending on how the train was feeling. Afterwards, children made their own "I think I can" train.

Children also choose which craft they wanted to do to help them remember the letter/sound /l/. Many of the children were excited with this and I let them do as many as they wanted. There was a lemon card, a licorice card, a lollipop card and a leaf card.

For snack we added lemonade and licorice and children searched for "l"s in the ABC cheezeit crackers. Fun and delicious!

We sang the lollipop song and did a direction following activity with lollipops also along with our e-story to reinforce and remember the /l/ sound.

We had our first show and tell. It went so well! Each child sat in the special share chair to talk while the rest of us listened and asked a few questions. Then we chanted "Thank you" and clapped with approval.

So impressive!

As we start to get settled in to a school-like rhythm, the preschoolers may amaze you already :)

We are practicing school ready skills, like sitting "criss-cross applesauce" with our eyes looking, our ears listening, our mouths quiet and our hands to ourselves showing we are ready to learn at circle time. We are raising hands tall and confidently to show we have something to share with the class. We are taking turns, lining up straight, being a line leader, working with a partner and even pouring our own cups of ice water from a pitcher at snack time.

What else is there to learn? Well we are working on phonics, pre-reading readiness and even some students are already learning reading skills. These students are learning how "every letter makes a sound" and then sounding out short 2 letter or 3 letter phonic words in our reading lab and then practicing it at school and at home on their letter rings. Our reading lab will grow as we add more letters, sounds and words. Today many students learned by sounding out m-a-p they could read the word "map." It was very exciting!

We also explored marbles, playdough and lite bright art which are all great fine motor skill practice, but shhh don't tell the preschoolers that!

We also had math lab where students had a job to organize mats from 1 through 6 in order and then place the correct group of animal math counters on eat mat to represent the number.

Last week for Spanish circle time, we read Eric Carle's "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" book in Spanish and did a flannel board activity.

Today during final circle time we read Eric Carle's "The Mixed Up Chameleon" story. Afterwards, the each student had a turn to choose between 2 written words to put up on the pocket chart. So for example, a picture of a fox was on the pocket chart, then a student was asked to choose between the written words: fox or giraffe. I was impressed how most of the time the children chose the correct word. They sometimes explained they heard the first sound of the word or knew one word was longer than the other. A few times, they shrugged at how they knew the correct choice with a sweet smile. It was a really neat activity.

Our letter of the day today, was "m" as in monkey. Please check out the you tube link to the kvetonpreschool page to listen to the m sound. I also added a video clip of the "hola amigo song," the "red is rojo song," and the "days of the week" song.

http://www.youtube.com/user/kvetonPreschoolpage

a new link

http://pbskids.org/lions/games/

a new link under my favorites... a great online game topractice the lowercase phonic with a multiple choice of words where the child listens and then picks the phonic sound to go with a word that starts with the same phonics sound.

So far, we have practiced "a" and today we added "p"

If you wish to do a craft at home, you can have your child make a
lowercase "a" ( http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/category/lowercase-a )
or lowercase "p" ( http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/category/lowercase-p )

As you are out and about try coming up with words that start with the a sound: apple, alligator, am, at, ask, ant, etc... do the same for the "p" like penguin, peacock, pajamas or pizza.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVseA_Q9BtI


We will be adding some color songs next week: jump start with red!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z42JXHZbTU0

process learning - an art and a skill

Sometimes, just the process of learning is fun. Students in general enjoy cutting, gluing and art just because it is inherently fun. While doing such tasks they work on fine motor skills and feel a sense of pride, independence and accomplishment.

Students completed the work which they started at the Open House and the first day of preschool. They had met new friends and worked on the skill of how to make friends by finding a classmate with the same color yarn and gluing it onto a poster board. All the colors of the rainbow had been reperesented.

The first day they started with a single color whole piece of paper. each one cut it into pieces small enough to fit it in a ziploc sandwich bag. Today they glued the pieces onto another piece of paper.

We read a favorite story, the Rainbow Fish and talked about how friends share. We practiced sharing and even used puzzle pieces to pass around the table and then put them together to spell out the word: f-r-i-e-n-d-s

During outside time, we sang ABCs to help take turns and practiced using words to show respect when asking for turns.

Tools to explore color

Students got to explore color using a prism, a flashlight and white paper. They enjoyed making rainbows and we got our fill of "oohhs" and "aahhs" as students remarked in wonder at the rainbows that seemed to appear magically.

For more color mixing fun, students tried on glasses with lens that can be overlapped to create a world of red, yellow, blue, orange, green and/or purple. Many were very savvy as to which colors they needed to created the color they desired.

Finally, they observed a colorful disk, colored in sections and predicted if they would see the separate colors if the wheel was spun.