F fish day- preschool style

 I've done ocean day in years past, but 'fish' day was new to me. 

We set this fun activity on the tables in the morning.  We spread contact paper on the table, sticky side up.  The kids can position and reposition shapes cut from foam paper directly on the contact paper.  The pieces come off easily to be saved, when the play is over.  One of our friends from class shared extra fish his mom ended up with after a birthday party.  It worked out great.

I started our circle time out with this little rhyme:

I used these numbered fish cutouts as I said it.

Then we danced to Laurie Berkner's, The Goldfish. The fish in the story brush their teeth and ride their bike and do lots of swimming. It's a good one to dance to. 
 
Then I read One Fish, Two Fish by Dr. Suess.  I skipped a lot of pages!  I dislike reading Dr. Suess. 

We played this number matching game.  I put the paper bowls on the flannel board and passed out the fish.  The kids took turns matching their numbered fish to the numbered bowl.  You can print off the fish (unnumbered) here.  (I am trying to figure out google drive for document sharing.  Hopefully this works.)

Then we looked back at some of the opposites in the book.  I made up more examples and let them say what the other fish would be.  Hot fish/ ______ fish,  soft fish/ ______ fish,  nice fish/ ______ fish, tall fish/ _____ fish. 

We sorted a little cup of colored fish crackers using this page.  The new 'natural' colored fish are short one color.  This sheet is from PreKinders.

We then rolled the dice and added that many fish to our bowls. Each child had a little half fish printed with a bowl.  The kids were pretty done at this point and several just started eating them.  One friend turned to me and said, "I'm think I'm just going to go play over there."  I wrapped it up pretty quickly.

At the very end of the day, I used this felt set borrowed from my co teacher to sing along with Octopus (Slippery Fish) by Charlotte Diamond.   It's a fun food chain song.  It's has a catchy little tune and will stay in your head.

Here's the f journal page for the week.  You can print it here. Hopefully.

Ff flamingos- preschool style

I had Ff family day recently.  The other teachers were going more towards being thankful for our family,   but I couldn't find a book I love and I knew my teaching partner was going that direction they next day.  I was ill-inspired.  Then I started thinking flamingos.  

I lucked into this great book at the library.  It's called Flamingo Sunset and is about a family of flamingos.  It talks about how the mom lays the egg in a mud and then both the mom and dad take care of the egg and then how the whole flock helps take care of the baby until it's strong enough to fly.  It's by Jonathan London.  The pictures are really nice too.

 

Then, I had prepared for each child  a flamingo and a set of 10 feathers. The feathers are programmed with letters A-F. There was a lot of cutting for me this week.  We've been working on ordering 1-10, so I thought we'd try it with letters.  You could take this a bunch of directions; spelling short words, working out number sentences, ordering numbers, etc.

Instead of working through this together, I wanted to see if some could do it on their own.  I had some larger feathers that I laid out in order for the kids to look off if they needed.  Several of the kids struggled, but the same number breezed through it.  Most were able to get the first A B C and D and then looked at the example and fill in a missing or confusing letter.  It's a little chaotic doing it this way, but I hate making the kids who find this a breeze sit and be bored, plus it lets us identify and work one on one with those who are still stuck on A.  Yeah, we had one or two stuck on A.

frogs- preschool style

Frog day was super fun. We had several students out.  I thought it was because the roads were flooded and you had to go all kinds of out of your way to get to school.  The other classes has full attendance, so it must have just been a germ we were passing around.   Anyway.  Here are the books I read.  The book titled Frog is by Angela Royston. It's a really nice book showing the life-cycle of frogs.    Fantastic Frogs is a favorite at our house.  It's by Fay Robinson.   When Bee was potty training, I read this over and over and over.  This book is all about how many different kinds of frogs are out there.

After I read Frogs, we talked all about the life-cycles.  I had a poster from back when I taught 2nd-3rd grade.  I borrowed the little plastic frog life cycle models.  If I ever come across a set at a store, it's on my list.  Never mind, I just picked one up on eBay.  I also borrowed the nice life-cycle cards you see on the bottom.

Another cool thing I borrowed was this puppet.  This photo makes it look like a tadpole is eating a frog, but its a puppet that flips inside out to go from a tadpole to a frog. This isn't the exact same one, but here's something similar.  This particular one is from crocodile creek, but it doesn't look like they carry it anymore.

We sang 5 green and speckled frogs and used these little paper guys.  They are on straws and poked into a paper towel tube covered with brown construction paper.  This frog image is from Mailbox Magazine, but any clip art frog would work.  My guys are printed on green cardstock and laminated.

I sent the kids home with a copy of the pictures and the words to the song so they could count along with us at home.  10 points if you can spot the spelling error.  That's a total of three chances here for points.  I was pretty embarrassed. 

We sang a song with this large frog puppet, a cut out log, cut out lily pag, toy bumble bee, mosquito and flea.  You could easily rework the critters to use what you have.  My little bugs came from the party supply store.

The frog lives in the bog, he climbs on a lilypad and hops on a log.

He snapped a a mosquitoe.  He snapped at a flea. He snapped at a bumble bee,  and he snapped at me. 

He caught the mosquito.  He caught the flea.  He caught the bumble bee, but he didn't catch me.

I had wanted to buy enough of those sticky hands to play a game with catching paper flies but couldn't find enough sticky hands at the party store.  Then I thought about adding velcro to the ends of party blowers and to the plastic flies, but didn't.

Instead, I picked up some party blowers on clearance and we used them for this song. 

In the Pond (farmer in the dell)

The frog lives in the pond,

his tongue is oh so long. 

He reaches high to catch a fly 

and then he sings his song.

Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit (blow blowers)

Ribbit, ribit, ribbit,

Hi, Ho, watch him go

his tongue is oh so long.

I had this frog sorting activity ready to go, but we ran out of time. 

We didn't run too much out of time, I did end up reading an extra book.  You've gotta love The Wide Mouthed Frog by Keith Faulkner.  It's so funny at the end.  The kids didn't seem to get it tough and I had to explain why it was funny, which totally doesn't make it as funny.  Oh well, I had a good laugh.

I set out this for our sensory tub.  I had some dried beans in the bottom to start but some in our class think they are for flinging.  This simpler box worked well too.

We worked on Mother's Day gifts, so didn't have a frog related craft. 

Also, I wanted to share this newer to me site that I've used the past few weeks and gotten several ideas from.  It's going on my favorite list.

I am linking up to some of these fine kiddo related parties:

Wednesday's A story + art = A Great stART  @ A Mommy's adventures,   Made by Little Hands Mondays @ delicate CONSTRUCTION Wednesday's Kids Get Crafty @ Red Teg Art's Blog, Tuesday's Show and Tell blog hop ad ABC and 123,  Tot Tuesdays at Delicious Ambiguity,  For the Kids Fridays @ Sun Scholars

fries for me

Here's an idea I got from my Aunt. She brought the kids some things to play with from her classroom when we went to visit her this summer. This is one of them.

I just went to McDonalds and told them I was making a math game and they happily gave me all the fry boxes I wanted. Hubby was surprised that it was that easy. I told hubby that I probably could have gotten them to fill them with fries for me for free too. People love teachers! I used to get the local grocery store to donate granola bars and apples on field trip days. Walmart even donated fish food and hamster bedding a time or two when we had an ark full of class pets.

These are yellow sponges from the dollar store. They came 4 in a pack and I bought 4 packs. Each sponge made 4 fries. So I got 64 french fries for $4. Each fry box is programmed with the written numeral and the written number word.

We added a pair of tongs which ups the fun level tremendously.

We count with them, then play a little, then count some more, play some more.

Here's the drawstring bag I made up to hold them. It's just a rough applique using scraps. The green strip fabric is an old thrifted pillowcase. It was perfect for a fry box.