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