R is for Rainbow

Button Rainbow Activity

     One of the things that my little munchkin and I explored today was Rainbows.

     We talked a little bit about the Letter Rr and spent more time talking about the colors of the rainbow. We looked at pictures of rainbows on the internet and read the book: Dora and the Rainbow Kite Festival.

   The Button Shamrock that we did for St. Patrick’s Day, was a fun fine motor activity and she likes to glue things onto paper--- so we decided to make a Button Rainbow!

Just look at that concentration! 

And here is the beautiful finished product!  

(And this one only took one morning to finish!)

Spring Literacy: Forming Words

Many of my munchkins are able to recognize many letters of the alphabet and some are showing a growing interest in writing or forming words.  
 

This week I created an activity for the Writing Center to provide those students who are showing an interest in forming words and/or creating a message.

I figured I would tie it into our latest interest: Spring.

I mixed up the words HAPPY SPRING and the students had to color each letter, cut each letter out and then arrange the letters to spell HAPPY SPRING by matching the letters to the sign in the classroom.

 

It ended up being a 2 day project but a good majority of my munchkins finished their sign, and they were very excited to take them home!

Happy Spring!

Happy Spring!

Spring is in full bloom in my classroom, even though the weather is not cooperating this week!

Here are a few things we worked on last week when the weather was warm and it actually felt like spring!

The munchkins have been discussing the changes in the weather and were very excited when we were able to change our Season Sign from Winter to Spring !  In discussing the weather and seasonal changes, they got hooked on the topic of rainbows.                                                                                                                                           

So we learned about the colors of the rainbow ( via ROY G. BIV) and each student had to construct a rainbow, using colored strips of paper.

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    Because I enjoy hearing what goes on in these munchkins’ minds, I love to do a lot of dictations and drawings and ask them to tell me all about their drawings. Sometimes I will give them a prompt and other times I just let them go at it and draw whatever is on their mind.

 We were so excited with all the warm weather we had last week and all we could talk about was being outside

 So with all the Spring excitement happening, they were thrilled when I asked them to draw their favorite outdoor activity!

This one is such an awesome drawing  =)

Oh, the things preschoolers say!!

Oh, the crazy things kids say! I like to just act like a fly on the wall in my classroom sometimes, and just listen to the munchkins have conversations with each other.

Here are just two snippets of the conversations that I have overheard this week that I can’t get out of my head!

#1

J: Did you see? There were two people kissing and hugging. Then the girl took her shoes off and it looked like the wife and husband, the ones who were kissing, were going to take their clothes off!

M: (looking very surprised at J) : Ummm, no I don’t watch that show. What channel is it on?

LOL! Oh dear… those girls……!!!

#2

E: I had a dog once. It was a Chihuahua. But I lost it.

N: How did you lose it?

E: Oh, he ran away. To the jungle.

LMAO!

Learning a lil’ about St. Patrick’s Day with my Preschool Munchkins

Just a note, I moved from the Chicago area to the Buffalo area last summer and my first job I landed was in a daycare center working with 3 year olds. It turned out to not be “my cup of tea”, so to speak. I desired to be in a classroom type setting where I would be actually teaching and working with children on a different type of level, as I was used to, having worked as a preschool teacher in a school district for 7 years in Chicago.

Anyhow, I began working in my current preschool classroom in the middle of February, so my classroom posts begin with March!

In my preschool classroom, we are not allowed to explicitly celebrate holidays (weird rule, but somehow I manage to squeeze it in my lesson plans and give students some general exposure to holidays without over doing it)

Here are a few things that my preschool students did as we briefly learned about St. Patrick’s Day. We briefly discussed the actual holiday and the history behind the holiday and then I took it a different route and focused primarily on symbols of the holiday, such as the Rainbow, Shamrock and Pot of Gold.

We have been working on patterns a lot and are slowly moving from AB patterns to more complicated patterns, such as AAB and ABB patterns. And I have a few students who can create an ABC pattern as well! All in all, they all did a very great job and I displayed their work proudly!

We also read the book, “Just a Little Luck”, by Mercer Mayer and then had a very elaborate discussion on what Luck is and ways in which we feel lucky!

I was thinking on my feet that day and rather than create a chart of our thoughts on Luck, we created a mini class book where each coloring page (compliments of kindergartencrayons.blogspot.com's Lucky as a Leprechaun packet) and each half page was labeled “I am Lucky because…”  I asked each child “Why do you feel lucky?” and proceeded to write down each child’s dictation in their sheet. I was very impressed by some of the thoughtful answers!

And I am VERY lucky to be working with some awesome four year old munchkins!!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

      In the spirit of St. Patrick's Day, I learned how to color rice for my munchkin’s sensory tub- another fun idea from some fellow bloggers! So about a week and a half before the holiday, I made green and yellow rice and added some fun little toys I found at Party City for her to play with in her sensory tub.

As you can see… she loves it! She asks to play with it like every other day....  I think it will just be her sensory tub fun for the entire month of March! 












On Friday, she helped me to sort buttons by color, for her St. Patrick’s Day art activity.

 

After she found all the green buttons, she carefully glued the buttons onto a wooden shamrock shape that I bought at an arts & crafts store on one of my many visits last month!

She started this on Friday evening and she was going strong BUT then she lost interest. So we put it aside and took a break.

She continued working on it Saturday morning after breakfast!

 

Working hard the next morning…

I had some leftover green glitter paint in my classroom from my preschooler munchkins’ St. Patrick’s Day artwork, so I brought it home for my own little munchkin to use to paint her Button Shamrock. 

Finally! A finished product!  That only took 2 days to make! =) 

That’s my little munchkin…doing things on her own schedule!

Ha! And here’s the best part of our St. Patrick’s Day fun that turned out to be an EPIC Fail ---- Green Shamrock Jello Jigglers!!

They DID NoT turn out very jiggly… =(

I think I needed either a smaller dish or more jello because it was just not happening for us!

We only managed to get ONE good looking Green Shamrock Jello Jiggler!

Better LUCK next year, I guess!

Hope everyone had a great St. Patrick’s Day weekend!!!

Finally up and running...Here is how I got started with my own munchkin!

          Well, there has been some minor delays in getting this blog up and running (the main obstacle being that my old laptop just wasn’t keeping up with me anymore!) But everything is all coming together and well, here I go!

Now that my little munchkin is 3 years old, I am very excited to do more fun learning activities with her at home! And with my recent addiction to Pinterest, I have come across many ideas that I can use in the classroom and many of the ideas are linked back to clever moms with awesome ideas, who have chosen to homeschool their children.     

        Those many homeschooling pins on Pinterest and being exposed to all those blogs have been the reason for all of this!  =)

        So I decided to start a little bit of homeschooling with my own little munchkin!  For about 3 weeks now, we have been doing a few activities on the weekend, thanks to some fun printables, (compliments of two of my many favorite homeschooling blogs: Confessions of a Homeschooler and 1+1+1=1), focusing on the first 2 letters in her name

          I was ectastic, but not surprised, that she really enjoyed doing these types of things at home with me, so I decided to move forward with helping her develop skills using homeschool ideas as well as ideas that I use in my own classroom!

         And so that is how this idea to blog began..... the homeschooling blogs have been a great source of my inspiration!! THANK YOU!

"Soooo.... Where is this all going?"

So even after 8 years into teaching preschool I find that I am still always looking for fresh new ideas to use in my classroom. Lately, thanks to my new addiction to Pinterest, I have come across many fun teaching and homeschooling blogs. It has all sparked my interest and I have decided to embark on my own Blogging Adventure!

With that said, my hopes are that this blog will be a place for me to document and share all the fun learning activities that I do with my little munchkins in preschool.  In addition, I will also be documenting and sharing all the fun learning at home that I will be doing with my own 3 year old munchkin, who calls herself “Omi”.

You Know You Are A Preschool Teacher When:

(Taken from Scholastic, with a few other additions)  ENJOY!!
 
 

• You can hear 20 voices behind you and know exactly which one belongs to the child out of line.
• You get a secret thrill out of laminating something.
• You walk into a store and hear the words "It's Ms/Mr._______" and know you have been spotted.
• You have 20 people that accidentally call you Mom/Dad at one time or another.
• You can eat a multi-course meal in under twenty minutes.
• You've trained yourself to go to the bathroom at two distinct times of the day: lunch and planning period.
• You start saving other people's trash, because most likely, you can use that toilet paper tube or plastic butter tub for something in the classroom.
• You can tell if it's a full moon without ever looking outside.
• You believe that unspeakable evils will befall you if anyone says "Boy, the kids sure are mellow today."
• You spend more money on school stuff than you do on your own needs.
• You can't pass the school supply aisle without getting at least five items.
• You find true beauty in a can of perfectly sharpened pencils.
• You are secretly addicted to hand sanitizer.
• You dig in your pocket for change and pull out beads, legos and a marble.
• You announce to everyone in the room "I need to go potty" before leaving to use the bathroom.
• You can be found in the children’s section of any bookshop.
• You only buy your own children toys that match your teaching themes at preschool.
• You have more picture books than other more ‘adult’ books.
• “How sad!” is what comes out of your mouth even though you are thinking “Stop it, you little bonehead!”