Week five 2008

Here are some great highlights from week five: Theme: The Alphabet Focus: Aa, Bb, Cc, Dd, Ee, Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii Classical composer: J. Strauss Special Visitor: Caleb’s dad, Don, presented Paper Airplane Folding 101. The children folded their own airplanes with a little help and flew them in a flying contest. Owen was the champion, winning the grand-prize paper crown/airplane combo. We all had a great time and appreciated Don’s thoughtful and fun lesson for our letter “A” day. Thanks, Don! Table Activities: In addition to letters, we are also focusing on a number each day. This week for table activity, we colored and cut the numerals 1, 2, and 3. You may have seen them in your child’s bag. We are amazed with the progress in their cutting as we practice this skill every day. Other table activities included marble mats & tongs, wooden word puzzles (the children see the picture and build the word puzzle below), sorting locking cubes and paddles, building uppercase letters with the Handwriting Without Tears wood pieces. Music: Camille Saint-Saëns’ returned for an encore several times this week as the children used their stick fish to follow the “Aquarium” up and down the scale. We listened to the 1, 2, 3 timing in many of Strauss’ songs and talked about the waltz. Activity Songs & Finger Plays: “We are the Dinosaurs”, “If I Had a Hammer”, “Jenny Works with One Hammer…”, “Grandma’s Spectacles”, “Give ‘Em Your Right Hand” (This song works on recognizing your right hand, looking someone in the eye, and saying “hi” politely.) and lots of repeat favorites. Handwriting: More, “My teacher draws…” (See last week’s entry), many demonstrations of writing lowercase and uppercase letters stroke by stroke, practice with gray block paper writing capital letters for those ready for such an activity. FYI, we identify each child’s helper hand by an imaginative name that starts with their first initial. For example, Caleb’s helper hand is Cornelius. That way we can tell Cornelius how to be helpful holding the paper and it takes some of the stress off of Caleb. This HWT technique is amazingly successful and one we use consistently. Art: Miss Cristina introduced the children to the triangle with such terms as “diagonal” and shared some interesting triangle concepts from the book, A Wing on a Flea: A Book About Shapes by Ed Emberley. The children saw clearly that three lines make a triangle and that they can make two triangles from folding one square. The children created wonderful representational pictures by gluing colored paper triangles to large paper triangles. Most of the children used the triangles to create their own picture, such as a sailboat, a bird, an airplane, etc. There was some great creativity present! Theme: We had lots of fun with crafts this week. Our much repeated rhyme, “B,b,B, a bat and a ball. D,d,D, a doughnut hits the wall”, illustrates our efforts to help the children recognize the difference between the lowercase “b” and “d”. This can be a skill that is not fully grasped until well into the early elementary years so we are helping to introduce the concept early in hopes your child will be able to differentiate and write these letters by kindergarten. We made a bat and a ball and a doughnut hitting a wall. We also had fun being dinosaurs and elephants, building garages and hangars for cars and airplanes out of wooden blocks. Storybooks: “A” Was Once an Apple, The Berenstein Bears B Book, Alpha Oops, Dinosaur, Goodnight Gorilla, A Wing on a Flea. The reading loft was a favorite place for many of the children during recess this week. Math: Small group work included: 1 vs. 2 number sense (Where do we find one and two on our bodies? 2 eyes, 1 nose, etc), two legged animals, what makes a pair, how to write a 2 (big curve and a little line across the bottom, counting by 2s including the 2, 4, 6, 8…cheer! Tri concepts and understanding the tri- means 3 with vocabulary such as tricycle, tripod, triangle, and triops (a shrimp that actually has three eyes!), Reading: Each day we practiced using our listening ears to hear the beginning sounds on common vocabulary words and sort them according to their beginning letter. Some of the children also worked on sorting the printed vocabulary words onto the correct picture. We tried to use different learning styles each day to practice the skill. For a, b, c, the students stood and tried to match their picture to the correct folder labeled with the letter. (See the short video clip below.) For d, e, f, the students used magnets to put their pictures near the beginning letter on the whiteboard. For g, h, i, the students used bean bags and tossed them onto the mat that sat on the corresponding letter. Using the different learning styles really helps kids learn skills more thoroughly and allows children who learn using their strengths. (To read more about learning styles, also called “multiple intelligences” by Howard Gardner, please see this interesting article: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm

Free-Play Fun: We were able to enjoy the last of our summer weather in the Backyard on the Airplane teeter totter! Throwing bean bags into baskets or at targets

Social Skills: We are working with the children very diligently to use their words appropriately, especially when they are in a stressful or frustrating situation. We use lots of modeling and praising and try to catch the kids using their words throughout the day, sometimes earning a sticker. We are continually seeing improvement. Thanks for all your support.