Week twenty-six 2009

Theme: Solar System (and Spheres)

Classical composer: We enjoyed listening to Beethoven again this week. His Fur Elise is the tune of our 8 planets song, words below: Mercury is closest to the sun Mercury is planet one Then it’s off to Venus, planet two Venus two, is where we flew Our home planet earth is number three Sing with me, the Earth is three After Earth comes Mars; it’s planet four Right next door is planet four. Big Jupiter is number five Just a short ride to Saturn six. …Saturn is Six… Uranus is seven it looks blue, Neptune eight looks that way too. Our solar system’s in the Milky Way The planets eight are really great! Spanish: el sol (the sun), la tierra (the earth), las estrellas (the stars), la luna (the moon) . Theme: The solar system is a great theme because the ideas are endless! We played a fun game where we represented the planets with different sized objects (small lids for the smaller planets, medium and large hoops for the larger planets, etc.) The children pretended to be a rocket ship. We counted down and the rocket zoomed to a planet. The children called out which planet the rocket landed on. It was super fun and the kids really are getting to know the planet names and order. We also played an orbit game. The sun was represented by a yellow ball and a rope tied at the ends formed an ellipse around the sun. The children took turns being a planet orbiting around the sun while the class chanted, “Orbit! Orbit! Orbit!” to reinforce this unfamiliar term. They had so much fun they requested to do this again at free time. A big hit this week was our astronaut craft. Each child put together the craft following specific directions. It was interesting to see their different ideas for flags. We loved how they turned out! (Miss Cameron thinks Miss Tracy was brilliant in the invention of this too, too adorable craft. Way to go, Trace!) . Table Activities: solar system floor puzzles, planets and rockets coloring pages, matching the planets with their clothespin-names (the kids did a great job sleuthing out the names by their first letters), marbles (spheres) and mats, plastic ice-cubes and tongs, play-dough . Art: Miss Cristina expanded on drawing skills and this time used crayon as the medium. The children followed specific directions to draw pictures, such as their favorite fruit, a self-portrait, their favorite place, etc. Cristina is going to use the pictures to create a small book for each child. Their drawing skills are really developing. It is exciting to see! Music: Barney’s “The Rocket Song”, “The Eight Planets Song”, “What Do You Do with the Mad That You Feel” by Mr. Rogers. This song is a favorite of the teachers and is a nice way to practice positive outlets when we are feeling angry. The first video is the beginning of the song talking about when we are angry. (Notice the acting skills of Noah!) The second video is the later part of the song when the kids can get really happy and silly. It’s a fun one!

. Math, Handwriting and Reading: For reading we practiced CVC (consonant-short vowel-consonant) words and built them with letter cards. One of the groups focused more on the individual letter sounds and put them together following a model. The other group built the words themselves given a verbal direction (“spell CAT”) and was very successful with the –at and –an families. It’s exciting to see the progress in reading. Handwriting and Math were combined as we used slates to write numbers with chalk following correct modeling and stroke order. One group worked on naming and writing eleven, twelve and the teens…this is a tricky skill! This group also created sets of the number of items. The other group worked on the numbers 100 and higher by first writing the tens and ones columns, then creating the hundreds column. For example, the teacher would say, “Write the number 57”. (The teacher practiced with them the strokes of some of the trickier numbers such as 3, 5 and 8. The rest, they did well) Then the teacher would say, “What would you need to do to make that into three-hundred fifty-seven?” The students would add the “3” in front to create the number 357. We also practiced naming numbers by the teacher writing a number, say 463, then covering the 4 while they read the 63, then letting them read the whole number all together. There will be a lot of reinforcement coming on this particularly advanced skill. We have only introduced it because of these student’s interest and desire to know, and we continually reinforce the supporting skills of sets and quantities throughout the preschool day. . Storybooks: Space Boy, Sheep Blast Off!, Tortoise and Hare Race to the Moon, Astronaut Handbook, and several non-fiction space, rocket and astronaut books including our beautiful giant picture book with amazing photos! . Free-Play Fun: We now have the reading loft designated as a “books” space or “fort” space alternately so that the children know what is expected of them on a given day. A sign shows which type of activity the loft can be used for. During "fort" time the kids used the movement ribbons to pretend to fish off the loft. Very creative thinking! We also had two days of outdoor play this week—yeah sun! .

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We will continue with our space theme next week and focus more on the individual planets, as well as star constellations. ……………………………………………