Week 4: Bb is for Band-aid

Week 4, already? We are having so much fun!  We talked about the letter Bb this week. We made and played things that started with the letter Bb!  Each Tuesday we will be making a letter like our Apple stamp "Aa" and our Band-aid "Bb", if you would like to start a little binder with all of them, at the end of the year you would have a great little ABC book.  You can punch holes in them or get plastic page protectors and slide them in each week...just an idea.  I happen to have 10 or so extra binders that are taking up garage space if you don't have an extra one laying around, I'd be happy to donate. Just let me know on Tuesday!

Free time...playing games and making friends :)

Continuing on our "about me" theme this month...our feeling puppets!

Here are the words to go along with our puppets...a kind of extended version to If Your Happy & You Know, think of it as the hidden track :)!

If your mad and you know if stomp your feet,
If your mad and you know if stomp your feet,
If your mad and you know it, then your face will really show it,
if your mad and you know it stomp your feet!

If your excited and you know it give a gasp...etc.

If your tired and you know give a yawn...etc.

If your sad and you know it say boo-hoo...etc.

If your happy and you know clap your hands...etc.

Tuesday

Oh What do you do in the summer time when all the world is green? Do you march in parades and drink lemonade or watch all the stars in the sky...is that what you do? So do I!

Well here are our little parade marchers with their flags, marching to "You're a Grand Old Flag".  These pictures are blurry because they were such good little marchers and so fast that it was hard to take a picture!!

Tuesday: UPDATED

OK, so here is Egg Head after 10 days!! I hope your Egg Heads are just as cute :)!!

How the care for my egg head (idea found here):

Our egg heads need a sunny window, maybe above the kitchen sink, a place where you are going to see them because they need water everyday!  The best way to water these little guys is a spray bottle.  I would just have them spray them every morning when they get up!

Here we are planting our egg heads "hair"!!

We are happy little egg heads :)!!  Don't forget to water us everyday and give hair cuts as needed!

A beautiful day for a picnic!!

So to continue with this months theme, "Oh What Do You Do in the Summer Time?" This week we are talking about gardening!

Thursday-blast from the past.

Our camp out continued and while we were reading stories around the "campfire" I was reading a book, Just Me and My Dad and my kids knew there was a record to it somewhere.  Yes a record!!  Not mine, I'm not old enough to have ever owned a record ;)!!  So during free time I ran upstairs and grabbed the record player (yes I even own a record player) and you would have thought I brought down a TV.  The kids gathered around that record player and laughed and listened and laughed some more.  It was the cutest thing, they loved listening to those books.  We have about a dozen kids books on record and we listened to just about all of them!  I guess I should have introduced the record player earlier in the year!
What a fun day "camping"!

Thursday

I love this months activity packet it's so cute! I found it here on Our Little Monkeys.
We finally finished our "five" week program of tracing shapes and lines to work on our letter making skills.  I put that in quotes because their five week program was for 5 days a weeks, so it became a little longer for us!!  But we finished and I have seen great improvement in some the the kids handwriting!! I decided to make these little tracing mats for each of the kids.  I took the shapes from the worksheets that were similar to the shapes in their name and added those on the top and then did their names down below.  I love the way they turned out and the kids did a pretty good job of tracing their names!

Today we talked about our bodies and what makes up our bodies.  We have arms and legs, we have eyes, a nose and a mouth. Then we made puppets and talked about all the things they needed too.  After we finished our puppets each of us got to introduce our puppet and tell everyone what our puppet liked to do!  Here are a few things these puppets like to do, swim, go to OMSI, go to church :) and go to the beach! The kids had fun with their puppets.  I thought they were all SO CUTE!  Anyway, another fun day at school!

 Oh did I mention today was pajama day :)!

Tuesday

In the eyes of a preschooler...
Earlier this morning my 5 year old got a hold of my camera and started snapping pictures.  Which typicly would consist of pictures of his nose and his eyes and then his toes or hair.  But then as the preschoolers started to arrive, the camera was turned on them.  So here is a picture of what a preschooler here at lil Chickadees might see.  Enjoy :)

There were SO many more pictures, I just used some of the best! Yes I realize there is a picture of a ceiling fan and another picture upside down...but I figured they see that ceiling fan a lot.  All those times in circle time when they just decid to lay down.  And the upside down picture is a great shot to show you that they often look at their world upside down when they hang upside down on the couch :)!

Thursday

Now that we know all of our letters we are focusing on our "little" letters.  Every big letter has a little friend!  This can be kind of tricky for kids to realize there are 2 letters for every letter, and some letters have 2 different sounds and then sometimes there are silent letters in words...too many rules...it's a wonder that anyone learns to read this language ;)!! Baby steps right.  Little by little they will get it.  If you think your child is struggling with their letters or their sounds, flash cards are great. Here are school we will continue to learn the sounds and match the little friends to their big friend.

Tuesday

I hope you all had a good break.  I think the kids came to school Tuesday all refreshed and ready to learn :)!! We had a great day and finished up our alphabet! Yes I can't believe it...it's done, we study the entire alphabet.  Our ABC book look great and they kids have fun looking at it!
I have to say our wall looks great too!  Thank you for bring in all our boxes!!  We talked about being little detectives and finding letters wherever we go.  Some of the places the kids said they could find letters were at the park in the car and at the store. I told me that was their homework, to find letter while they are out with mom or dad.  Helping them be a detective will get them to notice letters more and more and start them on their path of reading!! 

I Spy

I hope you're all enjoying the start of spring break!!
Here are a few examples of what I was asking for for our "I Spy Letters" wall. If everyone could bring one or two empty boxes/bags after spring break to add to our wall that would be great :)!!

Tuesday

Z is for ZOO!

My little zoo keepers:

 Playing the Zoo Graphing Game:

 Story time:

Thursday

 

Trying to cram two days into one made for a busy and fun day!  They got to try out our new St. Patty's packet that I made over the weekend it has lots of fun activities in it!

 Our color this month is GREEN so we made these cute shamrocks with split green peas (mine were a little on the dull side I had to spice them up a little with a dye!!).

And then our letter for the week...Y is for Yarn:

Thursday

What a beautiful day.  The kids had a hard time focusing at morning circle time because the sun was out and burning bright!! But we made it through and spent free time out in the sun.
We did manage to get some work done however.  We worked on our number books, this month is number 8. So we did our #8 page and also made a cover for our books.  We are almost done so I figured we better get other parts of it done!
After lunch we had to forgo singing time...again the sun was just calling our names! We have to take advantage of these very few nice days we get!!

Tuesday

 

X, what in the world do you do for the letter X?!  Well's here is what we did...took painting tape, made an X and then did marble paintings!  When we were done with the painting we removed our tape and had ourselves an X!!

Let me just say I am so happy to have a printer back so that I can make cute new games!!  I found this cute St. Patrick's Day packet over at Our Little Monkey's, the kids had fun in free time today working on it!

 There is matching shapes, counting, puzzles and sorting.

A new month...I always love a new month, a new fresh start, here is what we worked on for our tree, little Leprechauns.  We only had one sad leprechaun...the rest are perfectly happy to be stuck in a tree without treasures!!