blueberries for Sal- bears and berries

This post is out of order, I guess I thought I'd already written it up.  This is from Bb week.  First, Here's my sweet class enjoying our snack outside by our pond.  We have such a nice facility and grounds.  We are really blessed in that aspect.

So, back on Bb bear day, I thought I'd hit it double with Blueberries for Sal.  It's one of those books that just makes me happy to read it.  It's a little longer than some of the books we typically read.  I think the kids need that. 

Before reading, we looked at some real photos of bears.  I love using Lou's Animal Babies magazines in class.  The photos are cute and clear.  He's ready to upgrade to the older magazine in the series, but I'll miss this one.

After reading the story, we hunted the room for B and b on blueberries. They were laid out around the room.   I had a few other letters on blueberries too, but we only wanted B and b berries.  They each were to find one capital and one lower case and put them in the bucket. 

Then we used the elements of the story to talk about some directional words.  I made up a little 'book' with really large sheets of paper.  Each had a sentence with a directional word that told us where to place the baby bear.   I read the sentence and the kids helped place the little cub in the right spot.  We glued him in his correct spot.  This book is based on an idea presented at Homeschool Creations.

We had asked the kids to bring in a stuffed bear to class.  Later in the day, they introduced their bear.  We made a little class book with these.  I took a picture of them with their bear at some point in the morning.  When they introduced their bear, I asked them to say, " This is my bear, ______.  We like to ___________.   I filled in the pages as they shared. 

At the end of the day, we used these little teddy bears to 'pick' or cover up the B and b blueberries and not the other berries.

These are some activities I had out for the friends to work on when they had extra time:  This sheet has a number and then a larger blank spot for dot markers or for blueberry pom poms.  The 1-5 page came from Growing Kinders , the 6-10 page is one I made based on that.   

At home, Lou did his with a blue dot marker and enjoyed it. 

I don't think I ended up taking this addition activity in, by used it with Lou at home.  We used number sentences and little berry cutouts to solve them.  The bucket and pieces are available here at Homeschool Creations.

He was pretty impressed with himself for solving addition problems just like Bee. 

The craft the kiddos made was to decorate a bear cutout with buttons and then count up the buttons.  The number gets written on a bow tie.    This craft would have lent itself nicely to the book Corduroy, but I didn't think of that until I saw it in person. 

Can I just say again, that I love the internet.  I love sharing and getting ideas from everywhere in just moments worth or searching.  I am not sure how I taught before it was a resource like it is now!  Here's a side note:  When hubby and I were married 12 years ago, we didn't have a digital camera.  My mom had one at work and we talked about using it, but really.... what were we going to do with digital photos?   Why would you want those?   I also said several years ago, that someday they would make a phone and camera in one.  Perhaps it would have a calculator too! Wouldn't that be amazing? Good grief, look at what phones can do... anyway... I think I'll write in our thankful journal tomorrow that I'm thankful for the internet.

Baking contest submission

My bank has a Halloween celebration each year.  Honestly, it's kinda lame, but they have a baking contest and last year I won with this mini apple pie recipe.  Turns out there weren't many entries, but I stand by the apple pies.  They are delicious.  The kids didn't really want to go this year (even they noticed it was a little lame), but I did want to enter the baking contest again.   I was uncertain about what to enter and was debating over a few things.  Then, I  saw this pumpkin pull apart bread recipe like the day before at Sunny Side in San Diego.  

I entered it in the banks baking contest, but this wasn't my year.  Some cake balls won. I made extra loaves so we got to enjoy two at home.  It may have been beat out, but goodness was it tasty!  We added the glaze to only one and both loaves were nice.  I'm not a pumpkin person but the pumpkin flavor was pretty mild so I was able to ea my share. 

Ee elephant day- preschool style

Ee elephant day was a no-brainer for me book wise.  I love But No Elephants by Jerry Smath.This was such a fun book to work with because this was my book from when I was little.  I have read it hundreds of times.  I used to keep it and a few others from my childhood on my shelf and I read them to my elementary classes.  Even my 6th graders secretly enjoyed a kiddy picture book now and then.

I made up a class set of story sticks to go with the book.  After we read the story, we retold it with the pieces.   I couldn't find any appropriate clipart online, so I just drew out the animals and made lots of copies, colored and cut lots of pictures and laminated and recut them all.  Each has velcro on the back.  It was one of those projects that seems like a good idea at the time and then 3 hours in you're thinking... really?  All this for a 10 minute activity? 

Then, I had prepared a baby elephant who likes little lower case e peanuts and a big mama elephant who liked big uppercase E peanuts.  I spread out the peanuts and the kids chose either an E or e and fed it to the appropriate elephant.  The girls all chose the baby elephants and lower case e's and the boys all chose the newly named 'daddy' elephant and the upper case Es.  Then, I let them choose a peanut with a non Ee letter and say the name of the letter and place it in the house (since Grandma Tildy did not want elephants, she wouldn't have wanted the Ee peanuts).  I laminated all the peanuts, but the poor elephants were left naked and not safely protected in lamination.  My school does not have a laminator and my personal laminator is limited in the size of projects it handles.

These elephant cards were funny to look at.  They are from training happy hearts.  She lists several possible games for them, but I just showed them and we tried to guess what the word on the card was based on the picture and the sound of the first letter. 

This was the craft for the day.  Here's how it's made.  I tried to draw up an illustration in my 'paint program', but a description is best.  trust me.  A sheet of construction paper is folded in half hamburger style.  The fold here is the fold in the paper.  While folded, cut along a drawn line about 1 1/2 inch from a side edge.  Cut that piece in half on the fold.  One piece becomes the trunk, the other can be a tail or is trash.  On the large remaining piece, draw and then cut an arch in the center at the bottom.  Each side becomes a leg and the half circles cut out become the ears.  Decorate as desired; toes, face, etc.

At the end of the day, we worked on these letter puzzles.  You follow the E or e letters through the maze of letters to the end.   They are available at Tons of Preschool Activities. 

We used dot markers to follow the path. 

My Lou had done most of the letters, he loves them.

Other than the Ff family flamingo things still in my school bag, that catches me up with my preschool postings.  whooo.  

My sister was visiting recently and we checked a bunch of her school books AR levels.  Now she has me working motivated to recheck and label all my books  (AR has really increased their selection in the past few years that I've been out of elementary school!).  That's tonight's continued project.  Good thing day-light savings gets me an extra hour tonight, hubby is starting to notice the dozens of piles of sorted books all over the floor.

taking a break

I'm taking a break today from preschool posts this week.  

 I'll get back to catching up tomorrow.  

 We're also taking a break from all the extra videos and computer games we end up partaking in when we aren't feeling great.  

I wish we could take a break from all the sick germs at our house.  At least we all felt decent enough to play outside.  

Lou and I even missed a day of school, so you know we were sick.  We don't miss school lightly.  I ended up taking both kids to the doctor and we usually tough most things out.

Hopefully we are all on the mend now. 

I was reading an article the other day about making sure that you are in your family snapshots, instead of always behind the lens.  

We grabbed the tripod and set the timer for some fun shots of everybody who was really involved in the fall leaf jumping.

Dd dinosaur day- preschool style

Dinosaur day may be my favorite.  I think I said that about apples.  I mean it this time.  I love dinosaurs. Here's the letter D craft.  This one is Lous. D is for dinosaur.

We had so much to do today that I didn't even read any of the many many dino books that I brought in.  We looked at some pictures from nonfiction books, I'm going to let that count for reading a book

.   During arrival time and at a few other points in the day, I pulled a few kids aside and had them complete a page with a sticker to go in a little book.  The page reads, "_______'s dinosaur is ________."  They wrote things like that their dinosaur was 'eating grass'  or 'racing up a hill' or 'standing by hot lava.'  I've had the stickers for years (surprisingly they are still sticky) but think they came from one of those large sticker books that Aldis sometimes carries.

It was Dd week, so we added stickers to our Dd page to add to our alphabet book.

Wednesday is math day, so we try to included mostly math related activities.   We talked briefly how dinosaurs were egg layers.  For this activity each child had a sheet with 20 labeled dinosaur eggs.  Each child had a little baggie with more than enough little dinosaurs.  We rolled the dice together and then pretended that those eggs had hatched.  We rolled 6, six eggs had hatched, so we added little dinosaurs onto of the eggs. We continued until all the eggs hatched.  I've had those little green dinos for years as well.  The sheets were ones I made up in Word.  The dice is new- it's from the teachers store. The sides are clear and changeable.  I'm in love with it.

Then we made a graph.  Each kiddo got to roll the dice and pick the card showing what they rolled.  We used those to make a graph.  I asked lots of questions about the graph we made.  How many purples did we roll? What dinosaur did we roll the least times?  How many yellow and green did we roll together?   Did we roll more blue or more purple?  Are there any that we rolled the same number?   The dinosaurs for the graph are available here at KS1 Math.

I had these numbered dinosaurs for an ordering activity but instead used them to help guide us through the next activity. 

Each child was given a blank dinosaur and a baggie of clothes pins.  The pins were numbered 1-10.  The kids added them to their dino in numerical order.  I told them today that they could work ahead if they thought they could.  I noticed a few kids did it super fast and accurately.  I'm going to have to think about ways to extend my math for those kids.  A few got stuck in the 7-9 area.  That tricky 9 looks like 6 a lot.  Of course there were a few also who did get past 3 without help. After the fast ones were done, they disassembled their dino and went to the tables for paperwork.

Here are some other dinosaur things:  

Making dinosaur track art and plaster or paris fossils

Bb bee day - preschool style

I'm all of a sudden really behind on posting preschool things.  We start Ee this week and here's Bb.  

After reading some nonfiction bee books and looking at some photos of bees, we played a fun little game with canning jar rings.

My original idea involved making a little beehive out of slices of toilet paper tubes, but I couldn't work it out.  I was trying to think of something really shallow to use and suddenly thought of the kabillion canning rings I have.  That's a real number. I taught 6th grade math one year, I should know.   

These plastic bees are from a game my kids have.  I had my preschoolers place a bee in a letter B or b and tell if it was a capital or a lowercase letter.  Our bees did not want to land in the other letters.  

Here's Lou's bee craft.  Most of the kids had black marker or paint stripes, but Lou must have had something else he wanted to do. 

This is a new favorite activity for my preschoolers.  We lay on our bellies and place a paper on the carpet.  With a toothpick, we slowly tap they shape on the paper.  Once I did shapes, this week I had Aa and Bb.  It is such a versatile project and it keeps them quietly working for several minutes.  It's delightful.

last minute costume- Rosie the Riveter

I always wait until the last minute for my costume.  Lou and I were literally rummaging through the costume box and my fabric stash.   I showed Lou a picture of Rosie the Riveter and he thought a witch would be better.  Too bad Lou. 

I did a quick google search but ended up finding a few cute Rosie's on Pinterest.  I had a scrap of red and white dots fabric for the head handkerchief.  I wore a blue Old Navy shirt I already had on hand.    Pretty easy last minute costume.

 I added a name tag that I just made up in Word and printed on printable fabric. I ironed it on to the shirt with some fusible webbing stuff. 

 We did a little trick or treating in our neighborhood and then went out to our church for their big celebration.  (Here are more pictures of the kids in their costumes.)

We ate more candy than we should have.  I'm super glad I'm not teaching tomorrow!