Thanksgiving!

Hi Mom!
Thanksgiving is this week and I'm so excited! We finished up our Turkeys Unit with some turkey coloring by number- something we all did great with- and by making a few more turkey art projects.

We made a "Texture Turkey" with various seeds, beans, pasta & feathers covering it and talked about what they all felt like. It was a great opportunity to use new vocabulary words like soft & bumpy, pokey & rough. Plus, it's a keepsake because we traced our hands to be the turkey's body outline. :)

 In the vein of tracing our hands, we painted our fingers and palms of BOTH hands and stamped a turkey on two papers- one we made into a cute Thanksgiving card that was from "Your Little Turkey"- that's me! The second paper we painted BOTH our hands and stamped two turkey friends. The best part was gluing on the googly eyes, orange triangle beak and red wattle. Ms. Marianne had to look up what that red, bumpy thing hanging down from a turkey's face was. Who knew??


Since our letter of the week was Tt (and to review the rest of the letters we've learned because it was a short week), we practiced writing our Tt's (and other letters too!)

We followed patterns to create pictures with various shapes- great practice for our matching skills and observation. Ms. Marianne's favorite was the ice cream cone we created!
 Our final art project of the week was a Thanksgiving pinecone turkey. Ms. Marianne used hot glue where we told her to and we pushed the turkey's feathers into the pinecone to create his tail. Then we glued on the googly eyes, the beak and wattle to the head and the head onto the pinecone. Lots of fine motor practice and artistic talents came through in this project!

Since this week was Thanksgiving, we had only two days of class. We had a special snack that went along with our family Thanksgiving traditions study- Ms. Marianne brought in pumpkin pie for us to enjoy while she discussed how her Mom and she make it together every year for the holidays. Other friends shared their special traditions too- like "the boys go shooting while the girls stay home and cook", "we go see our family that day" and "we eat a lot of food at the Thanksgiving feast and watch football!" :) The holidays are so great!

 

Finally, on Wednesday, we read The Very First Thanksgiving Day by Rhonda Gowler Greene. This is a neat book that introduces (with well researched & accurate text and pictures) all of the participants of the very first Thanksgiving Feast and discusses why the feast was had. It's a cyclical story that repeats itself & builds step by step until it's back to the Thanksgiving Feast. Definitely a great way to introduce Pilgrims, Indians, the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock to preschoolers. The discussions we had were great! :)

 

This was a fun and full of memorable activities for us all.

 

Happy Thanksgiving to all of us and our families!

 

Love,

Your Child

and

Ms. Marianne

Turkeys, Turkeys, Turkeys!

Hi Mom,
Thanksgiving is fast approaching, and our adventures this week were mostly involving turkeys, in honor of the holiday. We made turkey necklaces by stringing beads onto elastic, and turkey hats with paper bags and foam pieces. Now we have some fabulous Thanksgiving garb to wear next Thursday. I'm sure everyone will be thrilled when they see our cool fashion accessories! ;-) The faces make it that much better, don't you think??

Our spotlighted books this week were T'was the Night Before Thanksgiving by Dav Pilkey (a hilarious book!!) and Turkey Trouble by Wendy Silvano. T'was the Night Before Thanksgiving (watch it here) is written in a style that mirrors the beloved T'was the Night Before Christmas poem that is so popular during the holidays. But instead of Santa Claus and 8 tiny reindeer, we have Farmer Mack Nugget and 8 tiny turkeys! The story tells about how the students in a class went on a field trip to the turkey farm and were devastated to find out that the turkeys, with whom they'd made fast friends, were set to be Thanksgiving dinner. To prevent that from happening, the students suddenly gained a ton of weight and had feathers hanging out of their clothing because they were smuggling their turkey friends home to save them!
In Turkey Trouble (watch it here), Turkey realizes he's in big trouble because he's going to be Thanksgiving dinner on his farm as well. He does everything he can to disguise himself as another animal, but to no avail. Finally, he concocts a plan that actually works- and makes everyone happy in the process. Our class laughed as Ms. Marianne read these story... they're two of her favorite Thanksgiving stories and she was happy to share with us :)

 
 
Going along with the theme of saving the turkeys from their fate, Ms. Marianne gave each of us a turkey that we had to disguise. This was our homework for the week, and we'll share them next week during our Thanksgiving lessons. We looked at pictures of turkeys in all kinds of disguises from ballerinas and super heroes to cats and cheerleaders. Then we each took a "rough draft" of our turkey and colored on it to show what we wanted to turn it into. I'm so excited to see what we all disguise our turkeys as when we share next week!



Since we were talking about Turkeys, our letter of the week just had to be Tt. We brainstormed words that begin with /t/- toe, tent, tub and more for our Letter of the Week Wall. Then we had a special snack- following a recipe together to make ToasT, which has 2 Tt's!

We focused a lot on rhyming words and nonsense words this week. It was a lot of fun to work with nonsense words. It's pretty challenging for most kids to come up with something on the spot when asked (and this uses higher level thinking skills, which Ms. Marianne loves!) but once we got started, we really began to get into it. :) The point in recognizing a nonsense word is so that when reading, I can differentiate between when something I read makes sense and when I should try again. For example- when I read the word 'lift'. If I sounded it out with a long /i/ sound, it'd read "life-t", which I recognize as a nonsense word. So then I'd try again, using the short /i/ sound and get 'lift', a real word. This ability to recognize a mistake and go back to try again will be a great skill for my reading toolbox. I know I'm still learning my letter sounds completely, but it's never to early to hone my listening skills!

Speaking of listening skills (and higher level thinking!), our rhyming words lesson this week was an interesting one. It's tricky to understand that words rhyme when their endings sound the same. Some of us were stuck on grouping things together (for example saying "dog" when Ms. Marianne asked "What rhymes with cat?") and others were listening to the beginning sound and matching words that way (for example saying 'mat' rhymes with 'mug'). To help us in this skill, we played a game together called "Beehive Jive" where we had to match pairs of rhyming words. We'll continue to practice recognizing and creating pairs of rhyming words a lot in the rest of our time together. But I can practice at home too!

For science, we reviewed our Five Senses and focused in on our sense of smell. We put it to use smelling Fall spices and determining which we liked, didn't like and that we thought were "just OK". We colored faces on our data collecting sheets to show our feelings about 5 spices: cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, ginger and nutmeg. It was an interesting experiment, because even though most of us like pumpkin pie and similar foods made with these spices, the spices smell significantly different on their own than when mixed with other yummy things. We had some pretty strong feelings about them. :) After we'd smelled each spice and recorded our feelings about it, we compared our data collection sheets and discussed our findings. Our group was pretty polarized on nutmeg, cloves and ginger, but we all liked cinnamon! Almost no one liked the smell of cardamom (an extremely strong spice where a little goes a LONG way!). Our findings were so intriguing. Each of us felt differently about different spices. We talked about how we all perceive things in a different way, and that makes us special!
 Finally, for math we did something fun to introduce the idea of addition, while practicing our subitizing. We rolled two dice and recorded our results in an equation table, by copying the dice (and practicing recognizing the pattern for each number). Ms. Marianne had already put the plus and equals signs on the tables for us. Then, we added together the two numbers we'd drawn and wrote the solution number in the final column on our papers. It was a neat activity that got us moving, copying, drawing, counting and in the end adding! We also spent a lot of time practicing writing our numbers. We all pretty much recognize and count to digits 0-10 out of order, so now we've moved our focus to writing and representing the numbers. Our writing is improving everyday!

This coming week will be our Thanksgiving lessons. We'll have yummy treats and read stories about the First Thanksgiving, as well as discuss our own family traditions. Please talk with me about what we do to make Thanksgiving special in our family. If I have something I'd like to share, please send it into preschool, with a short explanation note to help guide Ms. Marianne in discussing it with our class. :)

I can't wait for next week, and the Thursday off that I get to spend with my family!

Love,

Your Child

and

Ms. Marianne

Ii is for... Ice Cream!

Hi Mom!
What a full week we had this week. We're fully into our Fall Unit and we read some fun stories like The Little Scarecrow Boy by Margaret Wise Brown and Beauty and the Beaks- a Turkey's Cautionary Tale by Mary Jane Auch. We practiced making the "fierce" (our vocabulary word we learned with this story) faces that the Little Scarecrow Boy had to learn to scare off the crows in the first story. It was silly to see each other trying to copy his face in the book. We can make some pretty

 fierce faces in our class! What talent we have. :D We finished up talking about scarecrows by creating candy "corn-on-the-cobs" for the cornfield that our scarecrows we made last week are protecting. As you can see from the picture, a few sneaky crows have gotten past our scarecrows!

In Beauty and the Beaks, we had fun differentiating between real and make believe aspects of stories. Such as: chickens don't go to the beauty parlor for mani-pedis and perms! They also don't wear super high stilettos or brightly colored clothes. (The real-life model illustrations in this book are hilarious and we enjoyed studying them for all their hidden humor!) This book had LOTS of make believe for us to determine, that's for sure!

 Our letter of the week was Ii and we brainstormed lots of words that begin with the /i/ sound. Two main ones that we discussed and used this week were Ice Cream and Illustrator.

To practice being illustrators ourselves, we remade one our of class's favorite books: Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Each of us got to illustrate 3-4 of the pages. We used the book's illustrations (by Eric Carle) to help guide us if we needed some help. Then, we extended the story by adding our OWN pages! We each came up with a color and animal and we illustrated that page too. We all worked together as a team to illustrate our book, which is now a part of our classroom library. What talent we have in our class. :)

Some of the Moms have asked for a list of the High Frequency Words / Sight Words (HFW) that we're focusing on in preschool. Here is a link to them for your reference. We're focusing on the first 25 in preschool, but the first 100 (seen here: http://www.fishforwords.com/docs/fry_sight_word_list_100_by_5.pdf) are taught and used in much of the primary grades. This week we played a matching game with most of these words. Can you believe we've worked with so many already?!

We also did an in-depth lesson on basic place value. We learned about the tens and ones columns and practiced showing double digit numbers with Cuisenaire Rods (manipulatives for teaching place value). We looked at and talked about the relationship between ones and tens and how we create double digit numbers specifically. Ms. Marianne was pleasantly surprised at how well we were able to show numbers using our rods when she wrote them on her white board. We looked at the tens column first and counted out that many tens rods, and then we did the same with the ones column. Then we read the number, said how it was created and then said the number again. For example: 43 is four groups of ten and 3 ones. Higher level thinking and practice for 3-4 year olds! Like I said, we're some pretty bright and talented kids!

We also practice recognizing our numbers (subitizing) and played a Domino Train game where we had to extend the "train" by using the dominos in our group and matching them end to end, number to number. It was fun to be the last one who could add to the train. This game is also going to be one of our center games to play with to practice on our own.

Our final activity for the week was to make ice cream in a bag and celebrate the letter Ii! We read the recipe together (find it here http://spoonful.com/recipes/homemade-ice-cream-bag), poured half and half, vanilla and sugar into a ziplock bag and putting that into a larger bag of rock salt and ice. Then we shook and shook an shook it until the ice froze our mixture into soft ice cream. We even had rainbow sprinkles to put on top!
We were all a little messy from the salt water and we had to clean up once we'd eaten all of our yummy treat, but Ms. Marianne let us hose off the driveway too, since it was covered in salty residue too, so we ended up having extra fun!

What a great week we had. :) The next 2 weeks will be all about "Turkeys and Traditions", in celebration of Thanksgiving. We'll be having turkey themed crafts, reading fun and thoughtful Thanksgiving books, and maybe even assisting a turkey to hide from the farmer!!

Our homework is to discuss traditions that our family does for Thanksgiving. For example- in Ms. Marianne's family, they always use their very best china and crystal dishes for Thanksgiving dinner. Everyone dresses up in fancy clothes and spends the whole day together. Her favorite family tradition for Thanksgiving is when she, her mom and her grandmother make pies- using a secret family recipe and from scratch! :) Pumpkin pie is Ms. Marianne's very favorite Thanksgiving treat.

What makes Thanksgiving special for our family?

One last question to discuss as a family- what are we thankful for? :)

Love,

Your Child

and

Ms. Marianne

Scarecrows & Feelings

Hi Mom!
It's a new month! November is here and we celebrated by reading Cynthia Rylant's In November, which tells, in a beautiful way, how the earth tucks in all of her friends and loved ones for the cold weather ahead. We discussed what changes we've seen so far here, even though overall we don't get as many as other places do in Autumn time.

This week, to continue our fall topics of study, we met Jessie, Ms. Marianne's scarecrow. Ms. Marianne and her daughter made Jessie last year during her daughter's Fall Celebration at school. Jessie stayed with us for all of our class time this week, and now waves 'hello' on Ms. Marianne's front stoop.

With Jessie as our guest of honor, we talked all about scarecrows- what their purpose is, how they're created and what they do all day. :) In conjunction with this, we discussed our feelings. We shared times that we were scared (getting stiches at the doctor's office, when Mommy went to the hospital to have a baby sister, getting lost) and brainstormed other words that mean being scared (worried, upset, afraid). We talked about other feelings that we have too- Mad, Sad and Happy. We brainstormed other words for those feelings and talked about times when we've been mad, sad and happy in our lives. Most of us shared that we feel happy when we get to play outside with our friends- and most especially when our Moms give us new bikes! :D

To practice matching and remembering, we played a game with cards printed with pictures of scarecrows showing the different emotions we discussed. Taking turns, we found matches in the cards. Interestingly enough, it was a chance to see some emotions come out when some friends who really wanted to 'win' felt upset when they didn't get enough cards to do so. This was a perfect chance to discuss being mad and what we do when we are feeling that way. Everything ended on a happy note. :)

Our letter of the week was Ff (for feelings!). We decorated our Letter of the Week wall with /f/ words (fish, flower, fall, French fries, fan. fruit...) and practiced the /f/ sound. We also used shaving cream ("foam") all over our desks to practice writing Ff and all the other letters we've learned. Ms. Marianne was so impressed that all she had to do was call out a letter and we'd write it. Well, we did need a little help on some of them, but overall, we're improving and she can tell we've really been practicing. The shaving cream was so fun! Some of us were a little hesitant at first, but once we realized we could get messy and it would almost clean itself up, we really went to town writing out letters with our index fingers.

For math time, we rolled dice and copied the dots onto a 9- box paper to help us count, recognize and replicate the number representations on the die. This is a skill (well, many skills really) that will help us to be able to count quickly by recognizing almost immediately how many items are in a picture- in this case, dots. This skill is called subitizing. It will help us in higher grades with visualization, estimation, counting on, and composing numbers from other numbers. It's an important foundational skill for all the math we'll work with later on in life.

 We also worked on patterning again this week. We recognized and extended patterns (AB; ABC and AABB) using a scarecrow worksheet. Ms. Marianne helped us individually chant the pattern and be able to determine what came next. Our class just loves patterns!

Our hand coordination & fine motor skills are getting much better. We took turns with Ms. Marianne this week drawing shapes to fill our papers. It was fun to try and be the last one to draw. When we took our turn, we had to stay as close to her shape drawing as we could so that we didn't take up extra space around it. This activity helps us to practice tracing and replicating shapes in different sizes, and especially helps us to manipulate a writing tool- awesome handwriting, here we come!



Each of us created our own scarecrow heads (complete with "straw"!) for an art project this week. We hung them on the wall in a 'field' that we'll fill next week with Autumn Harvest things. :) We've got to keep those crows away!


Most of you heard us perform "I'm a Little Scarecrow" this week when you came to pick us up from school. It is sung to the tune of "I'm a Little Teapot" and goes like this:

I'm a little scarecrow, stuffed with hay. (pat tummy, like it's stuffed with hay)
Here I stand in the field all day. (arms out, swaying back and forth in the wind)
When the crows come out, they'll hear me shout- (flap arms like a crow)
HEY! You crows, you'd better GET OUT! (cup hands around mouth to shout, then shake finger to the beat / for each word yelled)

Ask me to sing it for you!

Next week will be filled with more fall fun... all leading up to Thanksgiving celebrations! For homework the next few weeks, can we please talk at home about our family's Thanksgiving traditions? What do we do that is unique? What things make the holiday special for us? We'll be talking about these specifically in 2 weeks.

Also, please let Ms. Marianne know if we'll be here for the preschool week of Thanksgiving (Nov. 26-27) because she has a fun, interactive class activity that will require us all to bring something from home to contribute. :)

Love,

Your Child

and

Ms. Marianne