Manners, Manners, and More Manners (Plus Some Snapping!)

We survived our second week together! We had a truly fantastic time this week, too!

We’re still learning routines and procedures. These things take time, and I’m sure we’ll have plenty of practicing and reviewing ahead of us. The kids have been doing a great job so far though. We focused on circle time manners this week. We watched a super cute video called Can You Teach My Alligator Manners?. (You can find it here, if you are interested in watching it at home.) We stopped as we watched and talked about what the alligator was doing that wasn’t okay and how he could change.

After we finished the video, we played a fun game to practice our circle time manners. I asked a question and rolled a ball around the circle to give each child a turn to answer. The children knew it was their turn to answer the question when the ball was in their hands. While they waited, they practiced their circle time manners; they sat on their X’s, watched the person who was talking, and waited for their turn to talk. They had a blast with this game!

On Thursday, after practicing all week, we made a list of circle time manners. The kiddos came up with everything I had hoped they would think of. Our four big rules are: (1) Wait my turn to talk. (2) Sit on my bottom. (3) Raise my hand. (4) Sit still. We’ll read through these rules every day, and I am sure circle time will be a breeze very, very soon!

Another highlight from this week was our snap paintings on Thursday. I read about this art project on another preschool teacher’s blog and thought it sounded like a blast. I was right! Here’s what we did: 

I stretched rubber bands around a cookie sheet, slid a piece of paper under the rubber bands, covered the rubber bands in paint, and let the kids snap away. This was a great fine motor exercise. The biggest challenge for them was holding on to the pan with one hand and stretching the rubber band with the other hand. It took quite a bit of strength for them to do this. Of course, the fact that they were splattering  themselves (and me) with paint made it all worth it! I'm hoping to get these paintings hung up on our art wall this weekend. Please come take a look at them!

We’ve also started to jump into some more academic areas. We’ve matched letters, sorted shapes, and practiced writing our names. 

Next week, we’ll be focusing on friendship manners. I’m going to introduce my absolute favorite friendship technique – buckets! I’ll share more about this next week. I cannot wait to share this with your children!

Rolling Out the Red Carpet

As I have mentioned in a few notes and in many conversations with you, we're rolling out the red carpet and becoming movie stars as we get ready for our graduation program!

I really, really wanted you all to see the children act out the stories we've been reading, but I know how impossible that would be if a large audience was present. (Let's face it - it's not very fair to ask a four year-old to get up in front of a large group of people and speak. I have a hard enough time doing that, and I'm much older than four years old.) I decided to turn our little plays into movies to get rid of the need for a live performance, and I'm really excited about this decision. We've been talking about movies and what making a movie involves. We've written scripts, talked about many different vocabulary words (like props, sets, and costumes), built sets, and practiced our roles.

The morning class is working on The Three Little Pig and the afternoon class is working on Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We have been practicing and practicing, and I'm planning to film the movies on Wednesday and Thursday this week!

Here's a peak at some of the hard work the children have been doing:

 Making the set!

 Trying out costumes!

I wanted to make sure we had some live entertainment for graduation too, so we've been learning a few songs to sing for you! The kiddos are adorable with this music. I have the music on the iPads, so they often play it during Interest Areas. No matter what they are doing, they cannot stop themselves from singing along with it! It cracks me up! This video kind of shows how this happens. Listen carefully, and you can hear children singing along in different parts of the room!

I'm super excited to share everything with you at graduation! I'm so, so proud of all the hard work the kiddos have done this year, and I cannot believe we have reached the end already. It is definitely a reason to celebrate!

Just a reminder: Our graduation is on Tuesday, May 22 at 6:30. I'd like the kids to be in the classroom at 6:00, so we have a chance to run through a few things. They may wear nice, dressy clothes!

The Naked Egg Experiment

I cannot believe it's Friday already! This week flew by!

We continued our study of eggs with a super cool experiment called The Naked Egg Experiment. Here's how it worked. Since we wanted to find out what is inside an egg, we needed to take the shell off so we could see inside. We didn't want to break the egg though. I let the kids try get the shell off using their hands, but none of them were successful. (Imagine that! :) ) Then I explained to them that if we put the egg in a jar full of vinegar for a couple of days, the vinegar would eat the shell off the egg and we'd be left with just the insides. We filled up our jars and put an egg in each one. The kids watched them for two days, and we were finally able to take the eggs out and play with them yesterday.

 (I tried to get a good picture of this process, but my hands were covered in egg goo and the kids were so excited it was hard to find an opening to take a picture. This is the best I could do.)

After being in vinegar for two days, here were some of the things the kids noticed about them:

• They were squishy.
• They were larger than a normal egg.
• They could see the yolk moving around inside.
• They bounced.
• When they finally broke, there was some kind of sack around the yolk so the kids could pick it up with their hands.

The kids were amazed at this experiment! They were all so engaged and asked many questions about what might happen next. A few of them hung out in the discovery center (where the eggs were) watching them for a good chunk of interest area time on Tuesday and Wednesday. They noticed all kinds of things about the eggs, like the cracks forming in the shell, and the bubbles that completely covered them. The room was full of a bunch of little scientists.

I've been spending a good chunk of time this week working on individual goals with each child. Some of the goals are in areas where an extra push is needed and some of the goals are in areas of strengths. Since we are getting closer to the end of the year, I want to make sure the kiddos are ready for what kindergarten and k-prep have to offer. I work on these goals mainly through various games and in interest areas. For example, for some of my kiddos, my goal is to help them start using inventive spelling. To do this, I find the children in the art center and offer them paper and markers. As they draw, I help them find the sounds in words to describe their pictures and write them down. For kiddos who have goals in numbers and counting, I have created a few games that ask them to identify numbers and count out quantities. There are other goals too - these are just a few examples.

Here's a picture example:

I feel this individual time together is really helping the children improve! In the last week, I have seen a ton of growth in quite a few children! If you would like to know what I'm working with your child on, let me know and I can give you some ideas for how you can help at home.

We'll be continuing our egg study next week by answering the questions the kiddos came up with yesterday! We'll also be doing a few more fun things with eggs (dyeing eggs and eating eggs).

I posted a schedule for spring conferences (April 17-29) on the alley door. Please sign up for a time that fits your schedule! There was also some information about important dates that will be coming up in the newsletter. Please put these on your calendar!

Have a great weekend!

Happy Grams, Listening, and a Whole Lot More!

I don't normally blog on Mondays, but today was just a great day! I need to share it with you.

So, as some of you know, last week was tough. I'm not sure what the source of the behaviors were, but the kiddos just had a hard time listening and staying in control of their bodies. I talked with some people who work at the elementary school, and the situation was similar over there. It was just one of those weeks. I decided to spend this week reviewing expectations and rules. I also decided to add in a few new positive reinforcements to help inspire the children to have a good week.

One of those new reinforcements is a Happy Gram. My hope is to send home one Happy Gram with each child every week. On the Happy Gram, I will write about a good moment the child had in school that day. This good moment could be anything from good behavior to mastering a new academic skill to simply having a great time doing an activity. I award the Happy Grams at the end of the day, and all of the children cheer for them! Today was a huge success with this! The children were motivated to work so well with each other, and they were really great listeners. I was super proud of them all!

We also reviewed what listening looks like today. I showed the kiddos an online story called, Henry B. Wigglebottom Learns to Listen, (you can find it here) and we talked about the troubles Henry got into when he didn't listen and how much better his life was when he did listen. We talked about how to tell if someone is listening, and how we can do that in the classroom. I am already noticing a difference in how the children are listening, and I'm sure that by the end of the week the kiddos will all be super listeners!

We're starting to explore color this week. I'm not sure if we'll do a full study on color, but I've been noticing the children drawing a lot of rainbows in their journals so I figured I'll see what kind of interest there is. To start the exploration, I added some colorful rice to the sand table and started a sticky easel in the art center. Here's what the exploration looked like:

 The easel is covered in a piece of contact paper, which makes it easy to stick things to it.

 I cut some strips of construction paper and the kiddos stuck them to the easel in whatever design they wanted.

There was all kinds of measuring and counting going on in this center all afternoon! It was also a great chance for them to practice sharing and working together.

I've got more color activities planned for the rest of the week, and we'll see where they take us.

Our first sign of spring visited us today too:

He visited us a couple of times throughout the day, and the kiddos were very excited to see him! I was too! Bring on the spring!

Oobleck and Green Eggs and Ham

We continued our fun with Dr. Seuss on Wednesday and Thursday. On Wednesday, we read Bartholomew and the Oobleck. This book is a long one, so we broke it into sections. After the first section, we made our own Oobleck. In case you're wondering how to make it at home, it's just two cups of corn starch and one cup of water. The result is a fabulous goo that is both a solid and a liquid. The kiddos had a blast playing with it.

The afternoon class had an especially fun time with it, because Salem's high school youth group dropped in to play with them. It was interesting to watch the children go from their normal selves to absolutely silent people back to their normal selves in the course of about a half hour. I often forget that the kiddos are just four and five years old and that they are still shy around new people! They had so much fun talking and playing with the high-schoolers!

Today, we spent some time with Green Eggs and Ham. Reading this story aloud is so much fun, because many of the children are familiar with it so they read along with me! It was also a great opportunity for them to fill in the rhyming words for me. I love this book!

Of course, we couldn't read Green Eggs and Ham and not make green eggs and ham, so we did just that. First, we graphed whether or not we thought we'd like them and all but two children said they'd probably like it. Many of them remember making them last year, so they already knew they'd like them! Then we got to cooking. I let the children crack their own eggs, which is always fun for them. Some of them are pretty good at it too. After the eggs were all cooked, the kiddos were excited to eat them! After the whole thing was said and done, all but one kiddo liked them! It was great fun!

Dr. Seuss is so much fun!

Kindergarten Round-Up and Dr. Seuss

Today was an exciting day! Kindergarten Round-Up was so much fun for the kids! For me, it was exciting to provide them a chance to share everything they know with their future teachers. The whole day went so well. The kindergarten teachers were marveling at how well this year's group of preschoolers behaved while they were at Round-up. At one point this afternoon, one of them came back into the room where the children were all playing and said, "Wow! You wouldn't even know there are kids in here!" They were busy playing hard and staying focused! (Which makes for one, proud preschool teacher, let me just say!)

I, unfortunately, forgot my camera in the morning. Luckily, I had it this afternoon though, and in terms of the activities, the two sessions were identical. Morning parents - look at these pictures and pretend the children in the picture are yours, and I'm sorry I forgot my camera.

The kindergarten teachers will be letting you all know how your children did as soon as they've had a chance to fully review all of their information. If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know!

Also, I feel compelled to tell you all how incredibly sad I am that my young friends will not be with me forever. I can't believe they'll be heading off to kindergarten and k-prep already. I feel truly blessed to have had this time with them, and I hope they stop in to see me every once in a while after they leave me for The Big School. I'm going to miss them so, very much!

This week we've been talking about Dr. Seuss. We were busy finishing up our bodies last week, so we missed celebrating his birthday. We'll be celebrating all of this week though! We started out by graphing our favorite Dr. Seuss books on Monday. The Lorax won by a landslide. (Of course, I wonder how much peer pressure played a role in this. Most of the kiddos were intent on picking the winning book instead of their actual favorite. It's all good though! Graphing is graphing either way!) We also read The Cat in the Hat and made some hats to go along with that story. I will be hanging most of these hats in the hallway as soon as I get a chance. To make the hats, the students had to find the pictures that started with the letter on the brim of their hat and glue them on the stripes. When we finished with those hats, some of the kiddos wanted to make hats, like The Cat's, that they could actually wear. Here's what they came up with:

Today, since it was absolutely gorgeous outside, we went outside when we returned from Kindergarten Round-Up. The kiddos blew some bubbles, ran around, and played a fun game of hide and seek with a rock they decorated. It was a great time, and I'm so excited to see signs of spring around us.

(looking for rocks to collect and to play hide and seek with)

We are still looking for volunteers to help with tip day on Saturday! Please sign up if you have any time free that day! Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who have already signed up!

Just the Beginning to a Crazy Week

Goodness! I can’t believe it’s Tuesday night already. The last two days have flown by. I’m sure a lot of that has to do with the visitors and phone calls I’ve had the last couple of days. I swear that phone is going to ring itself out one of these days.

A good chunk of time was spent on hearing and vision screenings on Monday. I’m grateful these services can be offered at SON Shine. It is incredibly beneficial to catch hearing and vision problems early! In general, the children just thought it was a lot of fun to be out of the classroom (we were in the Fellowship Hall) and to be playing “games” with new people. They had a great time. (Plus, they got stickers. I think I’ve said it before, but giving a preschooler a sticker is like offering them a lifetime of happiness.) While they weren’t being screened, they spent some time drawing and writing at the table. 

Today, we were back to our hard work on our bodies. We’re almost done! One more day on each body and we should be good to go. Here’s what our bodies look like now:

Morning:

Afternoon:

 

I had the kiddos do some interviews today. My hope was for them to practice a few social skills (using nice voices while talking and listening to each other), writing skills, and letter-sound correspondence through writing. We worked as a small group to pick out three questions they wanted to ask their classmates. Then, I sent them off with clipboards and pens to find the answers. They looked so grown up as they conducted their interviews. Asking all the questions and writing down their answers – they looked like adults. The really cool thing about this was how they decided to forego returning to their centers so they could continue the interview process instead! 

 

Next Tuesday is Kindergarten Round-Up. (Seriously?!? How did that happen? We just started school yesterday, right?!?) Preschoolers who will head over to the big school next year will come to SON Shine just like a normal day. I’ll walk the children across the street and stay with them during the Round-Up process. We’ll be back at SON Shine for you to pick them up there at the end of their class. If your preschooler normally comes on Tuesday/Thursday but will not be headed to the big school next year, you will have a day off from school on Tuesday – Enjoy!

Please remember to sign up for a time to help out at our tip day on March 10. Again, you can sign up for as little or as much time as you have available. Thank you, in advance for your time! I am so grateful to have so many fabulous families at SON Shine!

My Mommy Says I Can't Play with Shaving Cream

Okay, first of all, I'm very, very sorry I haven't blogged yet this week. For those of you who don't know, we're preparing for our verification from the state department of education. This means I've been working on a portfolio full of everything we've done at SON Shine, getting child files all organized and ready to go, making sure the classroom is in tip-top shape, and working with LMCPD and the school on our program portfolio. In other words, I've been spread a little thin for a while. I'm excited about this work though. I started printing my portfolio this morning and I can't wait to share it with you! Since the portfolio is directly tied to the state standards for early childhood, it is the perfect way for me to show you how SON Shine is a high-quality preschool. Our site visit will happen during the second week in February, and then I should be able to spend way more time on this blog. Just hang in there with me!

This week, we spent a lot of time working with the story The Three Little Pigs. First, I read it to the kids. Then, I told it to the kids using flannel board pictures. Then, the children acted the story out. (This was the coolest thing, by the way. I wish I had a video camera so I could record this for you, but maybe I'll work it into our graduation program at the end of the year.) Then, on Thursday, we compared the original story with The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieska. It was so much fun to experience the story this way with the children!

 Telling the story with flannel board pictures

Acting the story out

On Wednesday, we were finally able to cook with Jodie again. There had been conflicts for the last couple of weeks, and the kiddos were excited to get back downstairs and do some cooking! We made grilled cheese sandwiches and apple slices. The children had the opportunity to use a couple of new cooking utensils: an apple slicer and a pizza cutter. Those apple slicers require lots of muscles though, so the children worked in teams.

I think the favorite activities for the children this week involved shaving cream. First, we used the shaving cream to write in. Like I mentioned last week, we've really been working on letter recognition, so we practiced writing some letters in shaving cream. The kiddos loved it! At first, though, they didn't believe I was going to let them play with it. One of them told me, "My mommy says I can't play with shaving cream." She was so excited when I told her it was okay for her to play with it while she was at school! We also used the shaving cream to make our own puffy paint. It is made out of glue, food coloring, and shaving cream. The children had a blast painting many, many pictures using this puffy paint, but I think they enjoyed the feel of the pictures when they finished drying even more. The paint keeps its puffiness after it is dry, which is pretty cool! I'm hoping to hang these up in the classroom next week, so stop on in and see them if you get the chance.

Just a reminder: Next week, we will be preparing for our cheering performance on Friday. We will be practicing on Tuesday and Thursday at 3:30 in the high school foyer. (I will walk the afternoon class over after preschool, and you can meet us there.) I'm still not sure on what time we need to be at the school on Friday for the performance, but I'm sure we will find out on Tuesday. I'll be sending home reminders with the kids throughout the week, and I hope to see everyone there!

Have a great weekend!

All About the Polar Bear

We've been working hard on our study of animals this week! The kids were especially interested in polar bears, so we learned a bit about them today.

They wanted to know how polar bears hunt. I found an excellent clip from an Planet Earth-type documentary of a polar bear hunting a seal. Since the seals can hear the vibrations of the cracking ice as the polar bears walk across it, the bears have to be perfectly still. The seals make breathing holes in the ice, and the bears pick a hole and sit down beside it. When a seal comes up for breath in that hole, the polar bear is waiting and grabs it for lunch! Of course, in the clip I found, the polar bear chose the wrong hole, so he didn't get the seal. The kiddos were super excited about this whole process. They actually started shushing each other as they watched the clip - they didn't want to miss out on anything! Go ahead and ask them about it! I'd be interested to hear how much of it they remember.

We've been journaling this week. Instead of free-choice journaling, I've been giving the children a prompt to help guide their thinking. Not all the children have been choosing to answer my prompt, but most have. Their journal entries are completely different! I'm loving the changes! So far this week, the children have written about their pets (or their grandparents' pets or a pet they'd like to have) and about their favorite animals. I cannot wait to show you these entries at our next conferences!

I've been working hard to help the children build their letter recognition skills this week. Many parents mentioned this was an area of concern during conferences, so I've been adding in different activities to build on this skill. Here's a few examples:

 Letter and Letter Sound Bingo

Alphabet Train Puzzle

I know not all children have a letter recognition goal, so I've been working in letter/sound connections and rhyming activities too. 

We were lucky enough this morning to have Ellie's baby brother, Kyle, come visit! The children enjoyed learning about what Kyle likes to do and watching Ellie try to get him to smile. Thank you, Allison, for bringing him in! It's always fun to have a living person for show-and-tell!

Quiet End to a Busy Week

The last two days have been very quiet at SON Shine, and I’ve got to say that I really enjoyed them. Of course, quiet does not mean that we haven’t been learning; I just mean the kids have been very intent in their play and I have been doing my best to let them lead the way.

(First of all, I apologize for the lack of pictures. My batteries died yesterday, and I didn’t have a chance to get to a store to buy new ones last night. Sorry about that.)

We spent yesterday taking a little detour from our Lake Mills study. The kids have been increasingly interested in the marble tubes we have, and I decided to capitalize on that interest and see how the children solve problems. I built a few towers and took pictures of them before the kids arrived on Wednesday. During interest areas, I had the kids look at the pictures and try to build the same towers I had. It was cool to see them work as a team (or at least try - that’s definitely a skill that is still being developed) to create the towers. It was a great opportunity for them to practice taking turns and using words to communicate their ideas too!

We had Cooking with Jodie yesterday, and we made grilled cheese sandwiches! I think my favorite part about these sessions is the time the kids have to talk to each other. They share the craziest, most detailed stories during these times!

Today, since the afternoon class didn’t meet, the morning class had a relaxing day. Instead of doing my planned teacher-directed activities, I let the kids have complete control over what they wanted to do during interest area time. Many of them decided they wanted to use the listening center to listen to our letter songs – the ones from our graduation program last year. (It’s so much fun listening to them talk while they listen to those songs. They’re constantly saying things like, “Hey! This is Keely’s letter!” and “I remember this one! It’s Tara’s letter!”) The others spent a great deal of time building with the Legos. There was the inevitable singing and dancing to Tooy-ta and The Penguin Dance, and we even had some fun with the parachute.

All in all, it was a great way to end the week!

Have a great weekend!

Writing and Dancing and Letter Sounds...Oh My!

Wow! This week flew by faster than any other so far! Here’s what we accomplished on Wednesday and Thursday:

We started journaling this week. Each child has a journal in which they write at the beginning of each class. In just one week, it is amazing to see how intentional their drawings and writing have become. At the beginning of the week, I saw a lot of this:

 The kids would draw a picture, and I would add the words.

By the end of the week the kids were beginning to experiment with writing their own words, so I saw a lot of this:

 It may not look like much, but those symbols at the bottom of the page are my friend's words! He will read them to you if you ask him to!

It is just the neatest thing to watch these early literacy skills growing in my young friends!

Ever since the Read-A-Thon, music has become a huge part of our classroom. The new CDs I’ve downloaded onto the iPads come in handy in so many ways. There are songs to help us line up by the letters our names start with, songs teaching us about rhyming, and songs just for fun. I’ve started taking the iPads into our music and movement area, and they are always in use. 

 Dancing to The Penguin Dance!

We experimented with making music using water on Friday. The kids used baby food jars and a metal spoon to make music. They noticed how the pitch of each jar was different and how it could be changed by adding or taking away water. 

Outside, we played a game called Around and Around. The game was an exercise in alliteration (when two words start with the same beginning sound). The kids would walk around a pile of play food saying this rhyme:

Around and around and around we go.

Where we stop, nobody knows!

When I called, “Stop,” they would quickly grab a food item. I then pulled a picture card from my pile. The child who had a food that started with the same sound as my picture card won that round. This is a challenging skill for most of the preschoolers, but they are beginning to catch on. Take some time to talk about the beginning sounds of words with your child if you have some free time this weekend and let me know how it goes!

Next week, we’re going to start a study of Lake Mills. As I have been changing the dramatic play center to include different types of jobs, the kids have taken a strong interest in running a business and the different jobs people have. I’m hoping to take some field trips throughout this study to various businesses in Lake Mills. If you would like to assist with these field trips or have an idea for a field trip, please let me know!

On Monday, we are having a costume party. I sent home notes on each child’s shirt on Thursday, so hopefully you all found them. Please send your child’s costume with him/her on Monday. We’ll be parading our costumes throughout the church and at the big school. (The afternoon class will be participating in the costume parade with the big kids at the elementary school this year! I’m way too excited about this!) Then we’ll come back to the classroom for special snacks and games.

It should be a great week! I can’t wait!

We Read Up A Storm at Our Read-A-Thon!

Our Read-A-Thon was a blast and a half! The night had two purposes: first, I wanted to take some time to educate families about how they can build early literacy skills in their children, and second, each book we read helped us raise money for St. Jude's Children's Hospital!

We began the night by enjoying some delicious pizza from Pizza Ranch. I want to make sure to thank them publicly for helping fill us up for our big night of reading! Make sure to thank them if you visit any time soon!

After our supper, we headed up to begin the reading. We rotated through a cycle of a read aloud, family reading time, and an activity for the next two hours. Here are some highlights of our evening:

The kids enjoyed three read alouds, including two from our special guest readers: Mrs. Wagner and Mr. Sherman! 

We sang some awesome songs, including our favorite: Tooty-Ta! If you weren't able to make it, I'm going to try to work this song into another program this year so you have a chance to see this. It's hilarious!

We went on a scavenger hunt throughout the church to find the letters in our names. I think we're still missing an i, so if you find it while you're here some day, you definitely win the prize!

We ate spiders made from Oreos, licorice, and M&Ms!

Most importantly, we...

enjoyed some quality family reading time!

When the evening was all said and done, we gathered a rough estimate of how many books we read and how much money we made for St. Jude's. 

We read about 80 books and made about $350 for St. Jude's!

Great reading everyone and thanks for coming!