Back in the Groove!

Last week was our first official back to school week that all the sweet peas were here! They spent a lot of time just exploring their new environment and getting to know one another. 









One of the things they discovered about Pre-K was how independent they can be! They can get any materials out to use during free choice time, but they have to know where to return items and how to clean up. They loved the freedom they had to choose, especially at the art table!

 

We began the week with a classic story:

After reading Chrysanthemum we used letter tiles to spell our names and then we graphed how many letters were in our names.

Ms. Leslie worked with the peas at the art table and they created name flowers and added details with paint.

While we were getting to know everyone, we read some great books. Here's just a few!







After reading All I Am by Eileen Roe we made our first anchor chart of what we are! We spent the week re-reading our chart.

After talking about ourselves, we decided to make ourselves! As a snack! :) We made rice cake faces and added our eye colors along with other edible features.



The edible faces turned out pretty cute.



Later in the week we talked about our families and did a house glyph of who we live with.

We also started journals this week. After reading, re-reading and chorus reading our poem, we pass out copies to go into their journals. Then they illustrate them. We do journals every Wednesday and they can go anywhere in the room to work on their journals.

I didn't get all 21 adorable journal entries, but here's just a few. Most of them chose to illustrate themselves. 

One of my favorite activities we do in Pre-K is morning message. We started our morning messages this week during our morning meeting. Our morning message contains a greeting, the date and an interactive request, usually something that has to do with what we are learning about. Our morning message is very interactive. The peas quickly learn the repetitive pattern that contains the greeting and the date and we learn beginning sounds, how to stretch words, sight words and how to track print. You can always see the most current morning message on our easel by the library. 

In math we started simple, by sorting shapes. I made huge shapes out of tape on the table and floor. They really loved it.

 

We also started our handwriting this week. We just did an intro page so that we could assess dominant hand and grip. We use Handwriting Without Tears and we will be working in the orange book this year.

Here's just a few shots of our handwriting in action!

Well that wraps up our first week of learning and exploring in Pre-K! I think it was a great success. I can't wait to see what this school year holds!

 



Back to School at the ECDC!

Even though many friends returned to school last week, this week was our official start to our normal routines in our classrooms! We celebrated back to school with our Outback at the ECDC week! In Pre-K 1 we talked about schools and spent some time constructing schools of our own in blocks.

 

  Pre-K 2 did some building, too!

We spent time exploring our classrooms and learning centers and played with our new friends.

We explored our home center with fabulous dress up options,

and we did quite a bit of reading!

We also began our morning messages this week. If you would like to know more about how morning messages enrich our classrooms in literacy and print awareness, you can read about it here. Below are a few of the morning messages we introduced this week!

Sometimes the morning messages consist of our thoughts about a topic or group discussion. Other times they are very interactive. Eventually children will respond to the morning messages independantly with their own words and pictures!

  

We read Chrysanthemum this week and discussed how to treat our classmates with kindness. We also talked a lot about names since we are getting to know eachother!

In Pre-K 1 we made a name/picture matching game!

Friends could match pictures to names and then make their own names out of tiles. 

 

 This center was a pretty big hit!

 

 Pre-K 2 graphed the number of letters they had in their names.

While we were discussing names and letters, we did a lot of alphabet activities!

We even stamped our names into playdough!

 

And we added letters to the sand table!

 

In art we made name flowers. The sweetpeas loved getting to write and paint. 

 They did all their art independantly!

 

 They were very proud of thier work when they were done!

We also read this favorite story:

 

 Pre-K 2 discussed elements of the story as a group.

They also made their own kissing hand!

One of Pre-K 1's morning messages asked the class to trace and color their hands.

 

We assessed cutting and counting skills with a quick Chester the Racoon math sheet.

We were very impressed with Pre-K 1's scissor skills!

 
We also read this book:

It's a very sweet way to talk about how we make others feel. We can fill their bucket by showing kindness and using nice words, or you can empty someone's bucket by hurting their feelings or leaving them out. We made our own buckets to remind us that we want to fill our friends buckets up with kindness!

 

 We're hanging up our buckets on the wall!

To wrap up the week we read Pete the Cat-Rocking in My School Shoes

 We sure love Pete the Cat!

Since we do an awful lot of rocking in Pre-K 1, we decided to make a class book! We gave each sweetpea a paper to fil their name into this sentence:

 Next we took pictures of everyone's shoes. Here's a few! I will glue the pictures onto the pages later to make our first class book! 

 We also graphed the color of our shoes in our graphing chart. Here it is in progress:

 We had such a fun week in Pre-K 1 & 2 getting to each other. We have talked about big problems and little problems, discussed how to move in centers, learned how to pour our own water and accomplished a great many other things. The year is off to a wonderful start and we look forward to a great year in Pre-K!