Letter of the Day...Qq

When I teach the letter Q, I told my son it is usually followed by a U. I say, "Q and u are stuck like glue".
Online Activity:www.starfall.com

Food Ideas: Quaker oatmeal, quesadillas, quinoa, quiche
Art activity: I printed off the letter Qq: http://www.first-school.ws/t/alpha1/q.htm and gave my child a few Q-tips and paint of various colors. I always use washable tempera paint. He traced the Qq with the Q-tip and then filled it with lots of little dots.

Book: Quick as a Cricket by Audrey Wood. After reading this to my child, we talked about what it would be like to be quick as a cricket. I said it would also be fun the be as quiet as a mouse. We pretended to be quick crickets and quiet mice. My son said he would like to be as loud as a T-rex. I let him "draw" a T-rex and underneath it I wrote "I am as loud as a T-Rex!"

 Math: Quarters. I glued (usind Elmer's liquid glue) 4 quarters on a piece of cardboard. I placed a white sheet of paper over the quarters and let my son rub a crayon back and forth over them to do rubbings. He loved it! I also taught him the rhyme, "Quarter, Quarter big and bold! You're worth 25 I am told." I took out our money jar (a jar I keep in the laundry room to collect loose change) and we sorted out all the quarters. Then we counted how many we had. I didn't count the amount, just the number of quarters.

Letter of the Day...Ee

Oh my word it is difficult to keep a blog updated while teaching kindergarten and raising a family. It has been a long time since I updated and I apologize!
Letter of the Day is Ee.
I try to focus on the short sounds of vowels when teaching letters for the first time. That means that the letter e says /e/ as in egg. We had some fun with science for this lesson.
Empty vs. Full:
Take several empty, clear containers. I used plastic 4 plastic water bottles. I filled them with different amounts of water and left one empty. We added drops of primary colors with food coloring to each bottle and talked about the different colors. We also talked about what "empty" means and I had my child point to the bottle that was empty. Then, we added blue drops to the yellow colored water to make green. My child thought it was "magic". We also added yellow to the red to make orange and then red to the blue to make purple. We talked about which bottle was the fullest or had the most water and which had the least amount of water. We put the bottles in order from the fullest to the least amount of water. Then, I put a smock on my son and gave him some measuring cups and drinking cups. I put the water bottles in large tubs (I took them off of our toy shelving unit) and put a plastic table cloth on the floor of the garage and let him practice pouring the water out of the water bottles and into the measuring cups (while keeping them in the two containers for less mess). Again, we talked about which cup held the most water and which held the least. We lined up the cups by various size and talked about what happened when we poured one amount from one container into another. We talked about the colors that mixed as he poured them into each other. Then, I had him try to put the water from measuring cups into drinking cups without spilling. This was hard! He loved pouring from one container to the next and watching how the colors mixed. After an hour of this we cleaned up (he was stained with the food coloring on his hands and clothes, so BEWARE this is a messy lesson) and went to our next acitivity.
We used a printable tracer page to trace the capital E and lower case e. You can download it here: http://www.havefunteaching.com/worksheets/handwriting/zaner-bloser/letter-e-zaner-bloser-handwriting-practice.pdf
Its important that when teaching letter formation, you show your child how to hold a pencil properly. My son has a very difficult time with this. I think larger pencils are best to start with and you can find pencil grips in the shape of a triangle to fit over the pencil as well as other fine motor resources to help with pencil grip at your local parent teacher store. Make sure your child forms each letter from top to bottom and NOT from bottom to top. You can also use fun writing utensils other than just pencils. We use markers, highlighters, fun pens, etc. My favorite pencil grip helper is the wrist band with the little dolphin. It looks like this:

After our handwriting lesson, we decided to make an elephant with handprint art for our alphabet book. I painted my son's hand with gray paint and placed in down on white paper with his fingers pointing toward the bottom of the paper. I had his fingers spaced apart slightly and his thumb out to the side. After it was dry, we added a pink ear, gray tail, and a googley eye.
Food/Snack Ideas today: eggs, edemame, enchiladas, Eggo waffles, eggplant, and chocolate eclaire for dessert! Yum!

Book for today: The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper, Online story: "An Egg is Quiet": http://pbskids.org/lions/stories/nature.html

Online practice: www.starfall.com Click on ABCs, click on Letter E

Games: Etch-A-Sketch

Is Your Child Ready for Kindergarten....from a kindergarten teacher's perspective

Many of my friends ask me what to think about when determining whether or not their child is ready for kindergarten. Here is a checklist that I have taken from familyeducation.com and have edited and revised it with what I think is important to know. First, let me say that I attended an incredible seminar by David Thomas of DayStar counseling and the author of Wild Things The Art of Nurturing Boys. He said that if you have a boy and they are on the young side (this would be my son), it is best to WAIT a year before starting kindergarten than to push them through. I couldn't agree with this more. Boys mature more slowly than girls. There attention span is shorter. Their need for physical movement is greater. I refuse to start my son out as a 4 year old in a kindergarten class filled with 5 1/2 year olds and mature 6 year olds. I have seen first hand how large of a gap those few months present and it is very difficult for a 4 year old boy to make friends and be on the same maturity level socially as the majority of his peers. This can go for girls too. If your child is on the younger end and academically ready for kindergarten but is still not quite as mature as many 5 and 6 year olds, I would really reconsider enrolling in kindergarten. So here are some things to help you decide:

Kindergarten Readiness Checklist

by Peggy Gisler, Ed.S. and Marge Eberts, Ed.S.

While there's no perfect formula that determines when children are truly ready for kindergarten, you can use this checklist to see how well your child is doing in acquiring the skills found on most kindergarten checklists.
Check the skills your child has mastered. Then recheck every month to see what additional skills your child can accomplish easily.
Young children change so fast -- if they can't do something this week, they may be able to do it a few weeks later.

• Listen to stories without interrupting
• Recognize rhyming sounds
• Pay attention for short periods of time to adult-directed tasks
• Understand actions have both causes and effects
• Show understanding of general times of day
• Cut with scissors
• Trace  and name basic shapes 
• legibly writes first name
• writes numbers 0-10
• Begin to share with others
• Start to follow rules
• Be able to recognize authority
• Manage bathroom needs
• Button shirts, pants, coats, and zip up zippers
• Begin to control oneself
• Separate from parents easily
• Speak understandably
• Talk in complete sentences of five to six words
• Look at pictures and then tell stories
• Identify rhyming words
• Identify the beginning sound of some words
• Identify ALL upper and lower case alphabet letters
• Identify ALL letter sounds 
• Understand basic concept of print 
• Sort similar objects by color, size, and shape
• Recognize groups of one, two, three, four, and five objects
• Count to ten 
• Bounce a ball 
• has a good pencil grip...click this link for practice: Teaching correct pencil grip

Letter Cc!

There are so many activities to do with Letter Cc! We started by reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. I printed off (on cardstock) some of the foods from the book to use to retell the story. Click here for the pictures: The Very Hungry Caterpillar felt board pieces  Its important to help your child retell stories that you read together. This builds comprehension skills. Ask questions like, "What did he eat first?", "What happened after he ate all the food?", etc. Have your child use the felt board pieces to guide them when answering the questions. We also talked about the Days of the Week in this story.

We also counted each food item in the book. I showed my child that we count each item slowly and say the number as we touch each item. This helps to teach one-to-one correspondence.

For our craft, I cut out a bunch of different colored circles from construction paper. I wrote each letter of my son's name on each individual circle (in upper case letters). I had him trace my letters with a marker. Then we practiced spelling his name out with the circles. I let him have a blank circle to draw a smiley face on. Then, we glued the circles together to make a caterpillar that spelled out his name. He loved it! We hung it in his room and each night he says the letters in his name in order as he points to it! I also made up a song with the letters in his name to learn the order. I used it to the tune of "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain When She Comes". Other easy tunes are "Where is Thumbkin" (for names like B-E-N, B-E-N, my name is Ben, my name is Ben...), Jingle Bells, Row Row Row Your Boat, The Farmer and the Dell, and the Mickey Mouse song can all easily be changed into songs that spell out a child's name.

For lunch we had casserole and carrots. For snack we had Crasins and Cantaloupe.You could also make cookies together.

Counting! We practice counting each night to 20 while I he washes his hands and face.

Letter Zz!

The letter Z! We took a trip to the zoo first thing before it got hot!  Before going, I printed off  an alphabet chart and took zoo animal stickers with us. While there, we talked about what letter each animal started with and put an animal sticker on that letter. It turned into a fun game! We had a mid-morning picnic snack at the zoo...Zapp's potato chips and Animal crackers that I called "Zoo Crackers" (very healthy, I know)!

Once we were home we read our Zoobooks magazine about Zebras. Then we made the letter Z with stripes to look like a zebra. Printable large alphabet letters

A fun book we made was from the "Itsy Bitsy Letter Book" series from KidZone. You can find it along with the others here: Itsy Bitsy Books
Then, my little baker and I made homemade zucchini bread that was out of this world!! Click here for the recipe: Mom's Zucchini Bread

 Today, we also talked about what zig-zag lines are.I think that it is VERY important for children to learn pre-writing skills before learning to form actual letters. I started pre-writing skills with my son shortly after he turned three. I found a book at our grocery store that I really liked which had great pre-writing tracer pages in it. The book is called, "Big Workbook Preschool" by School Zone publishing company. It is important for young children to learn to trace straight lines first by tracing, then curved, full circles, and zig-zag lines. Having these skills will help them with letter formation when they begin to write. So, focusing today on "zig-zag" lines, we traced zig-zags, cut zig-zags, and then made zig-zags with Elmer's liquid glue and then sprinkled glitter on them. I also used blue painter's tape to make a zig-zag pattern on our garage floor for my child to walk down, and then hop down, and last ride a tricycle down. I made it pretty large so that he could really get the movement with his tricycle. Here is a link to Amazon if you'd like to purchase the workbook that I'm talking about: Big Workbook Preschool 






                                                 

A Letter a Day...Mm!

Today's Letter...Mm! We read a book called, If You Give a Moose a Muffin by Laura Numeroff.
A great website that lists preschool read aloud books for every letter of the alphabet is: http://www.letteroftheweek.com/lotw_booklist.html We then did an activity with matching upper and lower case letters. You will need a few clothes pins. Print off the cards on cardstock from the link: http://www.makinglearningfun.com/themepages/MooseMuffinUpperLowerClipCards.htm This goes along with the story. I had to help my son with a lot of these letters, especially ones that do not look like the capital letter (for example G and g). He loved this and as long as you make it a game, it is more fun!
                                                 
We did our Do-A-Dot art with the letter Mm. He is getting better at keeping the stamps inside the dots! This is a great fine motor skill builder. View my previous posts for Do-a-Dot letter printables.

  Afterwards, we traced lines from lowercase letter m to capital letter M for fine motor skill building. You can find a ton of letter M activities as well as this printable at: http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.com/Letter_Mm_Printable_for_Toddlers.pdf

 Our next M activity was a hit! I used m&m printables from: http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/blog/2009/11/prek-letter-m.html
My son had to complete the pattern using large m&m printables. Each time he got it right, he was rewarded with the real thing.

Our math activity was another m&m printable from the same link as above. He had to count the m&m's in the box and then find the numeral that matched the quantity. This is a wonderful one to one correspondence activity. I made him touch each m&m slowly and count out loud. Then, I put 4-5 numerals to the side for him to choose from. Great number recognition practice as well!

After nap time, we played Memory. This is such a fun classic!

A Letter a Day...Dd!

Today we woke up and went and grabbed donuts for breakfast! Afterwards, we talked about the shape of a diamond. I had my son practice tracing diamonds and then finding them in a hunt of many shapes. You can download the same activity here: http://www.kidslearningstation.com/shapes/worksheets/diamond-worksheet.pdf

Next, we read the story Dinosaur Roar by Paul and Henrietta Strickland. I bought a bunch of dinosaurs from the Target dollar aisle and we played with them, talked about their names, and then lined them up for largest to smallest. We made a dinosaur craft with the capital D to put in our alphabet book.

For snack we made "dirt" with chocolate pudding and crushed oreos. Click here for recipe: http://recipes.kaboose.com/dirt-cups.html  Then, we did an "I Spy" hunt with the letter Dd. You can download and print this I Spy page from: http://www.homeschoolcreations.net/2009/10/preschool-corner-all-about-letter-dd/

We discussed what a doctor is and why they are important. My son dressed up like a doctor and we made a "doctor bag". I pretended I was sick and had to "visit" him. He made me all better! :)

We did the Bible Lesson, "Daniel in the Lion's Den". We watched the cartoon on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83A03DlUI5g We talked about how when we are scared we can say a prayer for protection. This has really helped with being afraid of the dark at bedtime.

 After nap time, we talked about money and why we use it. I showed my son a Dime and we talked about its shape, the details printed on the coin, and that it is 10 cents. My son doesn't understand the concept of money, however I think its beneficial to introduce the coins and identify their names. We counted dimes and then went to the convenient store and bought a piece of candy (Laffy Taffy) and payed for it using dimes! Later, I put a handful of coins on the table and had my son sort out the dimes.