During the 'hello song' today, we each held a circle with a letter on it (d, s, t, p). We asked each other " What letter is that?", "What sound does it make?", and "Can you think of a word that starts with __?". One sound-symbol association that the kids need to review is for the 'd'. They tend to say the 'b' sound. If this happens for you, tell them that the 'd' is the 'tongue tapper' sound which will help them to remember to put their tongue up instead of using the'lip popper' sound of 'b'!
We made our way down the hall to find the letters, 'd, b, k, g, t, p, f, v', in a box of rice. As the kids found the letters we practiced their sounds and put them on magnetic boards. When we got back to the room, the kids took one letter at a time, identifying it and writing it on a big piece of butcher block paper. I was able to assess if they knew the sounds of the letters while everyone kept busy.
I am thinking back to September and appreciating how far we have all come!
As you saw when you picked your child up today, they each made a sensory box with Ms. Michelle and Ms. Erin during our OT time. Ms. Erin put a lot of time and energy into gathering all the materials and organizing this activity. Thank you so much, Ms. Erin.
We are going to start having our "morning circle' a little later in the day. This time includes:
1) reading a morning message together which allows us to work on print awareness, identifying target letters and their sounds, sight words, day of the week, and answering questions, 2) weather which includes science and math state standards, along with formulating complete sentences about the weather using the conjunction 'and', 3) calendar which incorporates patterning, rote counting, identifying numerals, days of the week, months, identifying 'yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and saying the date. On some days, we will include a graphing activity and/or measuring activity during this time also.
Today, we listened and watched a story, "The Berenstein Bears Go To The Dentist", on youtube. You can find it on youtube just by typing in the title of the book. Today was an overview of the book, allowing each child to tell us about their experience at the dentist. Tomorrow, we will answer 'who, what, where' questions while we listen to the story.
We made a trip down to the kitchen today to look at our science experiment. We took the eggs out of their cup and described what we saw using the questions: "Is it the same color as yesterday?" and "Are there any cracks in the egg?". The one in the juice looks orange and the one in coke has turned a lovely shade of brown. The eggs in the water or milk are still white and don't have any cracks. We made a hypothesis about whether each liquid would help or hurt the egg. Since the word hypothesis is new to the kids, we clapped out the syllables while saying it and talked about what it meant. We will be writing our results tomorrow!
Since we had a few minutes before lunch time, everyone worked on lacing the big paper tooth to work on fine motor and visual motor skills.
We had a really calm day, moving from one activity to another. Looking forward to tomorrow and seeing what happens in our science experiment!
