Queen, crowns and kites

Another day with the letters "K" and "Q".  We started out this morning with two of the kids using the Boggle Jr. games.  They caught on really well how to use them, so this is another of the things that I will be using from now until the end of school.

I had them get out their books and we worked on spelling words with vowels, such as hat, cup, fan.  Again, they were given instructions on what to do and they did very well.  The usual problem is writing d and b backwards and they were normal actions.

It is really exciting to see how well they are doing.  The next activity was to decorate a crown with little jewels They really enjoyed this.  We were able to complete it before snacks so that the paste was able to dry enough for them to wear them home.

I was able to tell them the story of the Princess and the pea.   How the prince wanted to marry a princess so his mother and father, the queen and king threw a ball and invited all the unmarried young women to come.  The prince, however, was unable to find one that suited him.  They thought all was lost until one evening it began to thunder, lightning and sheets of rain fell.  Soon there was a knock on the door and there stood a young maiden.The queen got her some dry clothes and prepared her for sleep.  The queen had her helpers prepare the bed and had them place 10 mattresses on the beadstead.  Under all of these mattresses she placed a pea.  It was well known that a true princess would not be able to sleep because she would be so uncomfortable.  Just as the legend said, this young princess tossed and turned all night long, unable to sleep.  When the next morning came, she was black and blue and had not slept much. The queen came to the conclusion that this was indeed a real princess and was introduced to the prince.  Of course, he fell in love and the two married.  What a story, huh?
the kids wore their crowns while I read the book Quiet Quail

The weather has been windy this past week and so the kids were given a kite to take home and hopefully the wind will bring them a lot of joy this weekend
Another good preKinder day.

"K" king and kangaroo Kazoo

There was a lot of buzz going around this day.  Even though it is not show and tell day, the kids seem to think it is and are buzzing about the things they have to show.  We had a lot to do, as usual, so we quickly got the group things done spit spat!! 
The kids never cease to amaze me as to what they have learned, so we keep on plugging along.
This morning we cut out the K king and got him arranged on the letter K  Sam really focused on getting his done and was the first to finish so he got to pick a prize.  He chose a little plastic tyranasaurus

 Avery finished second and picked this little star fish.

Monday was my birthday, so Julia sent my favorite angel food cake with strawberries.  The kids convinced me that it also needed chocolate syrup on it,so I tried it, and they are right. It was pretty darned good.

 The flowers are roses sent by my daughter Tammie and are their fragrance is breathtaking

When we went back into the classroom, they decided that they would like to make a human "K"  It is always lots of fun trying to keep them from giggling and wiggling.

Today I gave each of them their own workbook and I am anxious to see how well they can do now that they have learned most of their letters

Show and tell.  Sometimes I take pictures of them and don't realize that their item is not seen in the pic, and today was one of these days. Sorry. . . .  A brought the pirate from her pirate party

 I   brought a cell phone

 And guess who went to Disneyland??

We finished the day with a book full of K words

It was a good  day--then I was off to a birthday lunch with two of my daughters.  What a day!

"W" words, weaving and work

this morning we started the day with a worksheet that had circles that needed to be filled with words that began with the letter "W".  At the bottom of the page were 6 pictures.  We practiced saying the words and the sound of the letter as well as the sounds of other letters.  I had the children put their hand on their throat and make the sounds of the alphabet.  Then we watched the mouth as the letters were said.  then we cut out the circles with the pictures on them and placed them on the worksheet.  It was a lot of fun listening to the comments the kids made about those sounds.

The next worksheet was coloring upper case W red and lower case W yellow.  I only gave that instruction and was surprised to see that they were able to do that without any other directions.

Some of the kids have a heavy hand and are darker than others.  The important thing is that they are getting their colors inside the lines and are holding heir crayons better to get the feel of writing and coloring.  We did not get the coloring all done before snack and playtime, but were able to finish it when we returned to the class room. The kids have been dressing up this past week and I over heard one child say that she just wanted to be a cowgirl "cause I give a good yeehaw""  Cute, huh?
When  the coloring was completed, I was able to tell them about weaving and showed them a hand woven "throw" made with looms by the Amish in Pennsylvania.
Then we moved on to weaving with paper.

We finished off the weaving by pasting the strips on the edges and trimmed the colored strips.Tuesday we read and listened to a book about work so we were also able to finish the book and see just what they remembered.  They liked being able to listen and turn the pages of the book.

One never knows just what will help the child learn so some new technique or thing like the lite brite.  As long as it continues to help them, we will introduce more things.
It has been a good week!! PreK is a learning place.

"W" work and weather

We got off to a good start this morning with some doing puzzles, some on the lite brite and some doing the geoboards.  This week we will be learning to recognize the letter "W"  Only 6 more letters and we will have gone through the alphabet.
After opening exercises, we settled down to the table.  We added one more state to our area of learning--the state of Idaho.

Today we talked about the weather and made a weather indicator, and with magnets on the back, they should be able to put on the refrigerator so they can tell the family what the weather will be for each day.  We need to do more cutting so they can continue  progressing on that skill, and this was a fairly easy one.
They also had to put brads in to the holes and secure them so the spinner will give directions.

We tried something new today.  On the left side of the paper, there is a word finding activity and the word that they were to find was SNOW.  I showed them how to look horizontally and vertically to find the words.  They caught on very quickly and were all very happy to have found all of the SNOW words.

And they also had to find the matching snowmen.  I showed them, through the process of elimination, how to find the two  that were the same and the two that differed in some way.

Then it was play time and today the kids decided they wanted to dress up in the animal costumes.  This gives them practicing getting in and out of clothes and learning to zip them

When we came up from playtime we had show and tell  Ivy showed us her beautiful blue teeth; Brook told us about the sweater she was wearing that was her sisters; Cooper showed us Thomas Train; and Sam showed us his Monster truck and Brigham showed us his cap gun.

Then we talked a little bit about Work and what it meant to work  I played a tape which went along with a book and we read the first half which talked about how we get the things we have, such as furniture and breakfast food.  Be sure to ask the kids  We even practiced milking a cow!!

Another fun day at preschool