PreK and K Sharing Post Making a Theme Come To Life

PreK and K Sharing Post

We just finished up our pond unit and to make our theme come to life we went to the pond, the feed store and the pet store to actually experience pond habitats in real life!  The kids were thrilled and loved every minute of it!  You can read more about How we made our Theme come to life here at Pre K and K sharing! 

Let me know what you think!

Writing Workshop Wednesday and Sensory Art Pond life

I just realized that I haven't done a writing workshop post in awhile.  I am posting pictures of a few things we did for writing this month.  We are working on descriptive writing using adjectives.  In the picture above we talked about the difference between frogs and toads and graphed it on a venn graph.  The children used those descriptions to make a sensory art with bumpy toads and smooth frogs.  I did not tell them how to spell the words they sounded them out using decoding skills. 

To make this sensory art I had small colored noodles and sand out to glue onto the toads.  For the frogs they made a collage of shiny foil paper. 

We started our writing on this day by labeling a pond.  The kids used the labels to write a sentence and draw a picture in their journals.  If you click here you can see our Monet art we made to extend our learning on pond life. 

On this day we worked together to make og family words.  This was a preschool writing workshop.  After we were done the children used the moveable alphabet to write the words.  You can see more of our frog works at this post HERE

This is what Allie wrote about frogs.  It is such a blessing to be able to homeschool while I am also teaching.  She is getting so much out of it and loves it too.  If you click here you can see where we homeschool when we are not at preschool. 

We also learned the op family and did word works to go along with that.  We played sight word swat with the word swatters and we also played number and sight word lily pad hop.  The children hopped like frogs onto sight words on lily pads that were called out.

Keep writing and reading interesting and fun always! 

Creating + Learning = FUN!

Weekly Kid's Co-op Week of 3.16.12 March Monet

Weekly Kid’s Co-Op March Monet and other art

Please add your link at the bottom of this post!  For Art this month our special Artist was Monet.  We are studying pond life and I felt it would be appropriate to add fine art into that theme.  Water Lilies by Claude Monet is my favorite piece of fine art!  We worked with watercolor pencils and watercolor paper. 

First we studied a few of Monet’s prints and discussed what a landscape painting was.  The kids drew the water and the edge of the pond, and then they added the water lilies along with other details.  They finished by painting over it with water to blend in the colors.  The paintings turned out FABULOUS!! 

We also made lily pads by color mixing water colors on large coffee filters.  This was an extension to our color mixing work at the science table!  We added cupcake liners and tissue paper flowers

Here are a few of our frog art projects from this month.  We made cupcake liner eyes, paper plate mouths and self stick foam for the “sticky tongue”.

This month we also have been learning about ROY G BIV.  We read a story about a Leprechaun named ROY G BIV and he was trying to build a rainbow.  To extend this lesson I put out a ton of collage materials and instructed the kids to draw a rainbow and put the colors in order using any collage material they chose.  Here are some of their collages.  The colors, creativity and texture on these collages make my heart sing!

Rachel

I am linking up to Weekly
 
Kid's Co-op

Montessori Monday Pond Trays

Montessori Monday

Frog Pond Trays

We are studying frogs and ponds this month.  For Montessori Monday I

wanted to do a post about our trays.  I get quite a few questions and

comments on where I get my items and how I set up my classroom.  I am

going to give you some tips on how to set up interesting trays in your

 classroom and at home. 

This is a duck dropper work, the child squeezes the dropper to fill up the blue water and then fills up every duck on the tray.  This builds fine motor skills and hand eye coordination.

Let me start off by saying that I was a preschool, Kindergarten teacher

 and mom all before I got my Montessori certification and became a

Montessori teacher.  The way I set up my school and homeschool reflects

 both backgrounds and I believe I have combined the best of both worlds. 

This is a pom pom transfer extension.  They have to use the tongs to transfer pom poms to the matching color frogs.  This is a build fine motor and math skills.

 First I start with a theme,  for example this month our theme is pond life. 

 Every month I go to the thrift store, target and the dollar store to

 constantly look for interesting trays and containers that can be used on

 work trays.  After each holiday and season I shop all the SALES!!  I

 have built up items over the years and now I have an abundance of things

 to choose from every month.  At the beginning of each year I make a

 scope and sequence to lay out what I want the kids to learn for homeschool

 and preschool.  I break it down into months.  Every month when I write my

lesson plans I use this as a guide and I fill out each individual child’s lesson

 plan to target those goals.  Here is where the fun part comes in!!  I

 search my items to look for works.  For example if I have kids who need

to work on operating a dropper I will look for fun ways to reinforce this

 skill with theme based items.  Every month when I put out the new works

 the kids are always waiting in anticipation to see what will be next and

 even if it is reinforcing the same skill it is packaged in a new way thus

making it more exciting! 

These are some of our language trays.  The first one is the 4 little speckled frogs.  They use the felt pieces to retell the song and story.  This reinforces language skills, counting, subtraction and sorting.

Next is draw and label a frog and sort the frog life cycle.

Here are some of our math trays, Lily pad addition using frog counters, frog sort and classify, frog counting with counters, frog patterns

Here are a few of our Practical life trays,

  frog egg transfer using small Styrofoam balls, operating a dropper duck pond, build a turtle with wiki sticks and our sewing basket.

 Some items that I always keep in stock to use are:

theme ice cube trays and silicone baking trays, Silicone shape baking cups, Colored trays, Theme erasers, Small

 plastic toys such as frogs, Water beads, Suction cup bath shapes, Marbles, Dollar store items for sensory box,

 Different colored and scented play dough , Theme based counters and letters, Theme

 based shape books made on the cricut, Crinkle paper, Medicine droppers, Various scoops and tongs from

Montessori Services, Theme based foam or felt shapes from Oriental Trading, Wiki Sticks , Pom Poms, Colored

noodles, Pipe cleaners, Letter and number beads

With these basic items you can make hundreds of fun work trays and change them often to keep it

fun and exciting!!

What new works did you make this week???

Rachel

I am linking up with living montessori now and what's on the tray wednesday

<

Weekly Kid's Co-op! Frogs, Colors and Magnets

Weekly Kid's Co-Op~! Frog Colors and Magnets!
Every week we get together and combine our fun and educational kid's activities.  This week I am talking about frog life science.  Please link up your activities at the bottom!

This week for science we are learning about frogs.  We talked about Metamorphosis and explained the life cycle of the frog.  We acted out the life cycle of the frog after I showed them the frog life cycle work tray.  One of our students brought in a fabulous frog science set with real eggs, tadpoles, froglets and frogs!!  This is the most complete set I have ever seen!   

After we studying all about frog life cycles we got real tadpoles!!  We have three of them, in our science journals we drew a picture of what our tadpoles look like and wrote the date.  We will make observations daily and record our observations every Wednesday.  The older kids labeled the picture of the tadpole.  The last thing we did with the tadpoles was research how to take care of them and what to feed them. 

Our color of the month is green!  Frogs are green and St. Patrick’s Day is coming up and spring is hopefully on its way.  I introduced the color wheel and explained the primary colors (this was a review for them).  I then talked about the secondary colors.  I demonstrated how to mix blue and yellow and we discussed what color it made.  Then we experimented with different amounts of drops to see what colors it made. 

Our last science work this week was Magnets.  The kids explored with a box of objects and a “magic Magnetic wand” to see what would stick to it.  After they explored they would classify the objects.  Finally they recorded their findings by drawing pictures on a recording sheet. 

My class loved the opportunity to be scientists this week!  I am excited to watch them grow and learn more next week.