Rrrr, I'm Gonna Eat You - March Work

This month we have been talking about food chains and dinosaurs.  Honestly, I am not too interested in dinosaurs as a stand alone topic and neither is Ladybug, so to appeal to more than one person in this family I have attempted to combine the two.  

We started the month talking about herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores and the dinosaurs that fit into each category.  The dinosaur toob has been a great resource for this month.

Each time I have introduced a dinosaur I have given a fact sheet and a coloring sheet from Enchanted Learning.

Match the carnivores with the picture and name.  Each dino has their name on the underside.  We also discussed features that made the carnivores alike.

We have also talked about the animals that are not extinct.

After Mister and Ladybug had a good grasp of what eats what we moved on to who eats who with food chains.

Simple Food Chains 

Apparently a cactus grows in the savanna.  Mister and Ladybug pick a producer and two consumers to make a food chain.

More Complex (Complete) Food Chains

Chose the pictures to make a food chain and label the omnivore, carnivore, or herbivore.  

Art

How to draw a dinosaur!

Math

Number writing practice because who doesn't love a white board?

Fill in the missing numbers on the dinosaur eggs.  This was defiantly a challenge activity for Mister and Ladybug.

Game for two

Literacy

Dinosaur egg sight words (Mister's word) .  Ladybug is reading Biscuit books (her choice) and Mister is reading sigh word readers.  

Sight Word Soup - This game is played like Scrabble Soup, but with sight words.  Each sight word is written on a card and a chip.  One person picks the top card and shows the sight word.  The players put in their spoon and scoop out sight words written on wooden circles and blank circles.  When they find the the sight word they call it out and put it on their board.  When the cards are all gone the person with the most wooden sight words wins.

Practical Life - Name Writing

The Wee One

Two of the things on her shelf

Sensory

Dino feet prints

Dinosaur eggs

March?  Not so much in the tundra, which is why we are still in our pajamas in some of these photos.  I mean it's hard to get out of them when the windchill is still hovering around 0.

Making Reading Relevant and Fun

One of my favorite parts about doing preschool with  my kiddos is being able to really customize their work. In a classroom of 20-28 it's terribly time consuming and takes a lot of dedication.  To those teachers that do teach to their students, I admire your work and thank you.

Anyway, Mister has had some setbacks in reading and we were both frusterated.  He wasn't enjoying his work and I truthfully I wasn't enjoying working with him.  There was something wrong with that picture because he is suppose to love school. The last thing I want to do is to turn his love for learning into a chore.

After some trial and error I found he loves to be an illustrator or author and illustrator.  In the three weeks we have been working on books, his reading has soared.  Ladybug has taken a renewed interest in learning new words and reading harder books.  The best part is these books are totally customizable.  Sometimes I have Mister and Ladybug add their own ideas, sometimes I have them practice writing a word, and sometimes I just have them illustrate their book.  Each time they create a book, they read it to my husband right before bed.

Working on sight words

Ladybug's book was about making cupcakes.

Mister's book is about his favorite things to do.  

February Leftovers

A little of this and a little of that from February.  By the way it was really cold last month, which meant zero motivation to get dressed and less laundry for me!

Practical Life

This was a great activity to practice the pincer grasp.  

Math - What is Valentine's Day without candy heart activities?

Sensorial

Candy heart sorting.  How many do you think were ingested during sorting?

Literacy - A lot of sight word practice this month.

The Wee One's letter practice - Letter M

Art - Watercolor coffee filter hears

Feel the Love - February Literacy Shelf Work

I am sad to report that the love for sensory bins is dwindling around here so this month I recycled the Valentine Sensory Bin.  It's not all bad since this is the first time the Wee One has explored this bin.  Also it gave me more time to think about their shelf work for the month.  

Mister - He has really regressed on reading and is struggling a lot so we have returned to basic CVC words and sight words.

Ladybug - She has taken off reading and knows the majority of her kindergarten sight words.  We started working on Silent E.

Wee One - She has shown an interest in letters and reading, so we are focusing on letter sounds.

Mister has a tendency to put a "t" on the end of every word, so to increase his phonemic awareness I made a silly word sheet so he has to sound out each word.

Mister had to identify and color the sight words "the" "I" and "see".

Color chip word isolator.

Sight word writing.

Find the sight words.

There is a lot of Mister's work because Ladybug has been a little under the weather.  The Wee One's letter work will be in another post because she gets one-on-one work 3 days a week.

Also, I have the "I See" book and the silly word coloring saved and if there is interest I will put up a link.  Happy Working!

Our Abandoned Activites

We have spent very little time in our Learning Room this month, but we have been so busy enjoying nature and summer.  These are the activities we have dabbled in this month.

Literacy and Language - We are still working on beginning reading, sight words, and handwriting

Sight word sentence strips

Picture to word matching

Ladybug loves Benjamin Franklin, so we celebrated the postal service by writing a letter about one of Benjamin Franklin's accomplishments.

Math - We are continuing our study of patterns and simple addition and subtraction.

 

Sensory

Sun faded paper key matching

Practical Life

Mister and Ladybug traced a diamond, cut it out, punched a hole, and added a string to make a kite.

Maybe next month we will back into our routine, but in the mean time we are having so much fun!

I like...

Our Goodwill has an excellent section of books and most are in good condition.   Awhile back I found a collection (almost complete) of sight word readers.  I thought this would be a good part in our easy reader collection and since they were half-off I thought why not.

We have been reading Animals and did an easy extension using "I like to" as the prompt.

I asked them to use at least three colors in their drawing.  I also told them not to worry about the lines for writing.

Scholastic has Sight Word Readers for downloading and printing.

What's The Weather?

Here are the first set of activities on our shelves.

Math

Beginning subtraction - When I presented the activity I did a think aloud and said, "There were ____ dots.  One dot was crossed out and now there are ____ dots."

Literacy




Roll a word - I think I should have put green as first so it was go and stop. 

 

Words that rhyme puzzles

Sight word sentences.  When I presented this I made them aware of the capital letter at the beginning as a clue for the first word and the period at the end to send the sentence.

Nonfiction reading - I separated the books into fiction (in the book sling) and nonfiction on the shelves.

Sensory

We are starting to discuss money this month and I put a coin sort out. 

Practical Life

Dressing for the weather.

Raindrops

Art

When the circle dried I put them on the tray to add rays.