V v vegetables- preschool style

V v vegetable day:

First, we sorted some large pictures into vegetable or fruits or others.  We gave each a thumbs up or down too depending on if we liked them.   The big pages of fruits and vegetables are from old calendars.  My mom sometimes gets old calendars at work and my sister and I fight over them. 

Then I showed the kiddos this funny picture of a gerbil eating some vegetables.  I let them tell about the picture.  Some said he was going to eat the whole bowl, others decided that he had gotten into some people food.   I just found this through Google images.  I'm probably breaking some copyright rule by rephotographing it.

I had all the friends grab their pictures off our flannel board (that's how we take attendance among other things) and vote on a favorite vegetable.  I hung up several choices on the flannel board, that I had cut out of seed catalogs.  Two friends voted for cucumbers, one for carrots, and one for asparagus, all the others voted for corn.  The kids are getting really good at answering questions from a graph. 

Then we right into our first letter activity.  We did some vegetable shopping.   I gave each friend a paper shopping cart and a small set of stickers.  The shopping cart is just a clipart image I found online.  I cut some sheets of vegetable stickers in half to make them go farther (this is a full sheet).  They are from Joanns, in their new 'teacher' section.  I only needed 6 stickers per child.

I pulled some small picture cards from a basket.  If the picture was a Vv word they added a sticker to their cart. 

If it was not a Vv sound, we simply hung it on the flannel board (but they are photographed on my carpet)  under the right letter.  I only selected a few letters to work with this day. 

These great pictures and letters are from Pre Kinders.   I had to add a few extra v pictures.

Then I got to the book for the day.  I was looking for a different book at the library, but could remember the name and my favorite librarian wasn't on duty.   I read Eddie's Garden by Sarah Garland.  It was pretty good and more detailed than the other book I was looking for.    I had The Surprise Garden  by Zoe Hall as an extra and didn't end up reading it. 

Then we got to my second letter activity.  I was just so excited that the class is now able to handle this.  I had seen on Pinterest how you could use plastic plates as dry erase boards so I thought I'd try it out.  Somewhere I have a class set of real dry erase boards... I lent them to a teacher friend and I think when she left she must have lent them to someone else.  I may try to track them down this summer. 

I gave the class a nice pep talk about using dry erase markers and NOT getting them on your clothes.  I also discovered when trying this out with Bee and Lou, that you have to put your hand under them when erasing or the plate crunches down.  We talked about all of my expectations for them before I handed them out.

These won't last as dry erase boards forever,  but should finish us out this year.  We used them to write some letters.  I pulled out of a basket some ingredients to make vegetable soup.  We sounded the words first letter and the kids wrote that letter on their plate.  They could just hold up their plate for me to see, allowing me to quickly check everyone's work. 

 In the end we had some plastic vegetable soup.  This could have been done with real vegetables, but the markers put me over budget for this lesson. 

The craft was vines on a V.  Vegetable stamping on the V would have been nice too. 

At the end of the day, we got to this fun little song.  It's to the tune of Down in the Valley or Over in the Meadow.  I sang it once with the kids keeping beat with a soft clap.  I used the words little and plants in the blanks.  After that, we kept beat with slapping our knees and using different vegetables in the blanks.  Once they had it down, we got out the rhythm sticks and kept beat by tapping the sticks, or marching the sticks or drumming the floor.  We discovered 2 syllable vegetables worked out better in this to keep it with the beat; like carrot, pepper, or lettuce.

As with most days, we also squeezed in the phonics song from AJ Jenkins.  My kiddos are really learning the letter sounds! 

At the end of the year, we do some evaluations and one of the elements is letter sounds.  I feel like most of them will do really well with this because of this song.