We had so much fun last week!  We loved hearing the story of The Three Little Pigs!  And we loved acting it out!  

                                      

Another favorite story was 

Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons

To go along with this story I found a great subtraction game!  The children needed to count out 10 buttons for their shirt, they took turns rolling the dice and removing the correct amount of buttons.  The person with no more buttons wins!  We had a lot of fun with this one!

What have we been up to?

The children have been:

• Naming and describing the function of common classroom objects.
• Analyzing sentence pairs to determine which has more words and which has fewer words.
• Identifying the capital letter that begins their name and matching it to the Alphabet Sound Wall Cards.
• Identifying small letters and capital letters.
• Reading Pre-Decodable 3 The Picnic.

What can you do at home?

Help your child understand and learn concepts of print.  The most obvious way to help children build knowledge about print is to read together.  Here are some suggestions for when you are reading with your child:

• Find a quiet, comfortable place to read together
• Spend about ten to fifteen minutes a day reading together
• Read stories expressively
• Encourage your child to ask questions and comment on what interests them
• Ask questions that encourage children to think about the story.  For example, ask  "what do you think will happen next?"
• Talk about the pictures.  Ask "What do you see?  What are the characters doing? What do you think will happen next?"
• After reading the story share your favorite parts
• Reread stories as often as children request them
• Read different types of books

Young children are full of questions about how things work or why things happen.  Read books that spark their curiosity and encourage more questions.  Don't feel limited to reading only books. Functional reading is a wonderful way to support reading at home - following directions for a recipe or putting together a toy, reading the newspaper, reading ads, finding coupons to use when shopping and pointing out signs are all great ways to read with your child!

Happy Reading!!

I can't believe we are in the month of November!  Here are some pictures from the last week of October!  

Spider Day!

               

Slime!

          

Go Away Big Green Monster!

          

Here is a peek in the room!

                           The 3 year old class had a great time finger painting!  

They mixed yellow and red together to make a different color!  

Can you guess what color they made?

 Our 4 year olds just love the finger play 

Five Little Pumpkins!  

So we decided to make our own pumpkin puppets!  

This week the children learned:

• To identify individual words in sentences
• To identify the initial letter in our names
• We learned a song to help us remember the letters of the alphabet
• We read a pre-decodable with the high frequency word:  a

What you can do at home:

Read to your child everyday!  The benefits are immeasurable!  By reading to your child you are helping them increase their vocabulary and communication skills.  Reading to your child helps to promote academic success, as well as logical thinking skills!  But most importantly, reading to your child is a wonderful time to snuggle up and spend time together!  Take the time to read!

Practice the pre-decodables!  It is important to remember that mastery of the high frequency words is not expected.  Preschool is a time to introduce many skills that will be mastered in the future.  Here are some tips on how to practice these skills at home:

• Have your child point to the title of the story
• Have your child point to where we would start to read on the page.
• Ask them if they want to read it or if they would like you to read.
• Have your child point to each word that is read.
• Have your child tell you what is happening in the picture.

Skills that are important for your child to learn are that we read from left to right and that all stories have a title and an author.  Remember, it is NOT expected that your child knows how to read in preschool, this is just an introduction!

If you have questions please let me know!

Lisa

We will be having parent/teacher conferences on November 3rd.  I will have a sign-up sheet available for you to pick a time that works best for you.  Conferences will be kept  at 15 minutes.  If we feel that more time is needed we can always schedule another meeting.

Hello Everyone!  As you know, our reading/language arts program in the school is called Imagine It! through this blog, I am going to try to keep you up to date on the skills we are learning in hopes that you will continue working on them at home!  This week we have been working on:

•  the concept of order and the order of words first, middle and last
• an introduction to the alphabet through names
• expanding our vocabulary by adding the first high-frequency word: a  (4 year olds only)

How can you expand this knowledge at home?

• When the opportunity arises, talk about first, middle and last.  This works great during play!  "Look, my car is first!  Which car is in the middle?"  Any opportunity to have your child understand this concept is great.  This is needed for children to understand where they hear the sounds in words.  For example, what sound did you hear first in the word "cat"?  last? in the middle?  This is the beginning skill for reading and writing!  So practice order!
• Be sure to relate the spelling of your child's name back to the alphabet.  We talk about how the alphabet is used to write names and words.
• Lastly, we will be introducing many high-frequency words.  When you are reading to your child, take a moment and point out the new high-frequency word they are learning.  This will help them to understand that these words are everywhere.  They will become excited when they find a word they know!

I hope this was helpful!  Please let me know if you have any questions!