We practiced our words from the farm today as a sneak peak into our theme for November. These dry erase cards and markers will be available to the students in the writing center during Pre-K classes. We practiced how to use the materials and clean them up when we are done. What will we find on the farm this month?
Names come in all different sizes. Long names are no easy task. However, recognizing letters that children already know helps make what can be a tedious process seem more manageable. Today we discussed how letters start from top to bottom, and left to right. We also pointed out letters we already knew. A difficult letter (and very common!) is the lowercase e. In preschool, we make an exception in teaching how to write lowercase letters when it comes to names. Writing names in all capitals is a very bad habit to get into!
When learning our letter sounds, it is important to make connections between the written letter and the sound it represents. These letter-sound connections create the foundation for young readers. While learning the letter R, the children were able choose different colored roller painters. While rolling out the letter R, Ms. Lori talked about things that begin with the letter R, such as rollers and rainbow.
Developing fine motor skills is a precursor to properly holding/using a pencil, tying shoes, using scissors, buttoning one’s own buttons…the list goes on. These muscles must be exercised and used to their fullest potential in order to develop further. Today, we used child friendly tweezers and pinching to put cotton balls onto our Halloween ghosts. We worked on squeezing the cotton ball between the tweezers and dropping it in the desired spot. We also pinched the cotton balls to pull them apart. We had a spooktacular time!
Establishing a routine with the “young” toddlers is important for their social and emotional development.
Ms. Lori gave us the opportunity to learn about Adobe Homes today during our art experience. We learned that adobe homes are found in Mexico and throughout the southwestern United States. We also learned that these homes are made of a mixture of sand, clay and water and formed into bricks before building They are used in these areas because they help keep the homes cool in the heat of the desert. We used a sandy mixture to paint our own adobe home in a desert environment.
Most lowercase letters are a smaller version of their uppercase counterpart. But, there are some lowercase letters that look completely different than their uppercase version. Some lowercase letters look similar among themselves (q, p, b, d) which makes decoding difficult. We worked on fine tuning our ability to recognize uppercase and lowercase matches as well as their sounds. They did a great job!
In small groups today, Pre-Kers combined Math and Literacy as we listened for and identified the initial sounds in words. Then sorted them by initial sounds. Hearing each sound in a word is just as important as being able to identify each letter in a word. Being able to hear each sound prepares students for both reading and writing. You can practice this skill in a very informal way…traveling to and from school, during bath time, or at the dinner table. Super easy to make into a game, have fun with it!
Creative Tots has specialized in the private education of both toddlers and preschool age children for over 15 years. We began in the heart of Madeira and now also have a new Mason location. We are specifically designed to focus on early childhood development for children ages 18 months to 5 years.
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