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
