The ZooMobile!

Today we had a special visit with some animals from the zoo!  The theme was "How Animals Move" and we listened to a book about animals and all the different ways they can move. The kids had such a great time learning about several different animals and getting to see a few up close and personal! They had a chance to touch a sea lion's fur and a cheetah's fur, as well as see an armadillo, a Polish chicken, a tarantula and a snake.  Below are some great pictures from the visit as well as a video of the kids moving like all the different animals from the book.  It was so fun, and we are so thankful to the Kansas City Zoo for offering us this great opportunity.

The Action Alphabet

One piece of our curriculum in Grain Valley is called Animated Literacy. This is something that the elementary schools use to teach letters and sounds, so we introduce parts of this curriculum in Early Childhood. In Animated Literacy, each letter is represented by a character and the sound that letter makes is represented by an action. For example, when we learned about letter A, we met "Actress Annie" who has a pet alligator and likes to add on her abacus.  So when we think about the sound A makes, we cross our arms to make an addition sign and say "A for add...a, a, a."  Each week we learn about a new letter and sound and add it to our "Action Alphabet" song. I wanted you to see the actions for each of the letters we have learned so far in case you see your preschooler doing any of these at home. This way you can help your child practice too.  Plus, it's pretty cute to see them singing. :)

Once we learn all of the letters and sounds, I will post another version so you have the complete song.

January Recap

I apologize to you all for not being as active on this blog during January, and I promise to improve in February!  With settling back into routine after break and illness at my house, this month has been a blur.

We have been learning more letters each week and adding the actions for each sound to our "Action Alphabet" song.  I plan to get a video of the kids singing this song posted here for you soon so you can practice it at home as well.  Watch for that soon!

Our first week back we reviewed some basic skills and we also got to do a couple of the games that we had missed at our Winter parties.  Here are a few pictures of the kids playing "Hungry Snowman."

During our "O" week, we studied opposites and had fun matching up things that are opposites. This can be a fun game as you drive in the car: Say a word like "big" or "hot" and have your preschooler come up with the opposite.

The "P" week was so much fun as we wore our pajamas, made mini pizzas with English muffins, and had a popcorn party!  We also got to play with puzzles and play dough.

This week we are studying the letter Q, so we played a game sorting toys that were "quiet" or "loud."  (I was so proud when one student said, "Those are opposites!")  We are also going to practice patterning by decorating a quilt.

We have been working on spelling and tracing or writing our names and we will continue that into next month.  We have also been working on cutting. At home, you can have your preschooler practice cutting by snipping straws, or cutting play dough, or cutting apart the little magazine inserts that are made of thicker paper.

Enjoy Your Break!

I was hoping to post today about our fun Winter Parties, but bummer, we weren't there!  I hope you all enjoyed the snow today and your little ones got to have some fun.  Thank you to everyone who sent in items for the party, and we will do some of those activities when we come back in January.

I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas and I hope you all get to spend some fun family time together over the break.  I will see you and your kiddos in January!

Mrs. Chaloux

Christmas Fun

Today we had a fun trip to The Essex of Grain Valley Assisted Living Facility to sing Christmas Carols.  We've been practicing our songs all week, and the kids were excited to perform them this morning.  Here are some pictures and a video of our trip!

A few friends on the bus ride (sometimes that is exciting in itself!):

 Some of our class and others from our school waiting for the show to start:

Our first song, Jingle Bells (The facility was not very large, so our students were pretty packed in there, and our class is toward the back, so you can't get a good view of all of the kids...sorry!):

In addition to our Christmas songs, we've been doing some fun learning activities with our themes of Winter and Christmas.  We practiced cutting skills snipping coffee filters into snowflakes.  We practiced spelling and/or writing our names when we made snowmen out of the letters in our names.  We practiced identifying longer and shorter by sequencing strips of paper by size and making cute Christmas trees.  Here are some pictures of a few of us counting marshmallows as "snowflakes" onto our numbered snowmen.

Math Games

We used this week to review some of our skills, and that included a lot of fun learning games.  I wanted to share some of them with you in case you would like to play them with your child at home!

Itsy Bitsy Spider Game
Materials needed:
Ice cube tray or egg carton
Plastic spider rings
Spinner or numbered die

1.  Start by singing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" and acting out the motions as you sing.
2.  Place your ice cube tray or egg carton vertically between the players as your "water spout" that your spiders will climb up and down.  Place your spiders in the bottom of one side.
3.  Each player takes a turn spinning the spinner or rolling the die and moving their spider that number of spaces up one side of the "spout" and once the spider reaches the top, it will move down the other side.
4.  Play continues until both spiders have climbed up and down the spout.  This game helps with number recognition and counting with one-to-one correspondence.

More or Less Game
Materials needed:
Circles cut out of construction paper to look like cookies--Draw a different number of chocolate chips on each cookie (Numbers 1-10)
Cookie Jar or some type of container

1.  Place the cookies inside your container.
2.  On each turn, decide together whether you will be looking for "more" or "less" this turn.  You could flip a coin and heads could mean "more" while tails means "less" or you can just take turns deciding.
3.  Once you know whether you are looking for more or less, each player reaches into the container and pulls out a cookie.  Count the number of chips on your cookie.  If on that turn you were looking for "more" the player with the larger number of chips wins the turn.  Or, if you had decided on "less" the player with fewer chips wins the turn.
4.  This game helps practice counting and number concepts such as comparing numbers.

Parking Cars Game
Materials needed:
Construction paper
Toy cars

1.  Prepare your paper with "parking spots" by drawing lines and numbering each space with a different numeral.
2.  Give your child a toy car and call out a number, and he or she must drive the car to that parking spot.  Continue calling out numbers, or to increase difficulty, roll a die and have your child count the dots and then find the corresponding numeral in the "parking lot."
3.  Another variation on this game would be to prepare your "parking lot" with letters of the alphabet and have your child park the car on the letters you call out.

Fly Swatter Game
Materials needed:
Fly swatter
Index cards labeled with numbers, colors, letters, or shapes

1.  Decide on the skill you would like to practice; ie: colors, numbers, letters, or shapes
2.  Label index cards with those items and hang them in various places around the room.
3.  Give your child the fly swatter and call out a color, number, etc. and have him or her run to the correct card and "swat" it.
4.  This is a fun way to review skills while getting some movement in.

Shape Hokey Pokey
Materials needed:
Paper shapes in a variety of shapes (or if you have a shape puzzle, you could use pieces from that)

1.  Gather your family to make a circle and hand out the shapes to everyone participating.
2.  Sing the traditional Hokey Pokey song, but call out shapes rather than body parts.  For example, "Put your CIRCLE in, Put your CIRCLE out, Put your CIRCLE in and shake it all about.  Do the Hokey Pokey and turn yourself around, That's what it's all about!"
3.  Continue calling out different shapes as you sing.

Number Memory Game
Materials Needed:
Cards labeled with numerals 1-10
Cards labeled with different number of dots

1.  Mix the numeral and dot cards together and lay them out face down on a table.
2.  One player turns over two cards, looking for a numeral card and a dot card with the corresponding number of dots.  If they are not a match, turn them back over.
3.  The next player turns over two cards, and play continues until all of the numeral cards have been matched to their dot cards.
4.  To start this game, you may want to use only the numbers 1-5, so there are fewer cards to be matched, and then build up to 1-10 once your child has a better understanding of the game.

Thanksgiving Feast!

Today we celebrated Thanksgiving at Early Childhood.  We are so thankful for the parents who helped by sending in all of the delicious food and for the volunteers to help during the feast.  It all went so well!  We encouraged all of the students to try at least one bite of everything offered, and they ALL did!  We ate turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and rolls.  This month's character trait is "Be Polite" so we got lots of practice asking for "more, please" or saying "no, thank you."  After eating with our class in our room, we joined the other classes for some pumpkin pie, a story read by Ms. Juliann, and a Thanksgiving sing-along.  Everyone had such a great time this morning!

I want to tell you all how thankful I am for your children and the chance to spend my mornings with them.  Enjoy your holiday, however you celebrate it!

Now check out some of the pictures from our feast: