preschool

(the above are all "e" week pictures but...
I put on 2 hrs of preschool for garrett and 5 friends every Wednesday. We just do it for fun. Last week was the best so far! (weeks previous g was the only child not listening and running amuck- but he did it finally! woohoo) anyways last year when i traded off with these moms my SIL wanted me to post the details- i never did but i've kept track this time. heres what we've done so far:

we sit on a rug in front of a pocket chart that displays our letter of the week and flashcard looking things of the words of the week. we sing " d says duh d says duh every letter makes a sound d says duh" or whatever letter we're working on

A: ant, apple
B: bat, bakery, ball, butterfly, _____
we bought a kit from insect lore and watched the caterpillars go into cocoons and hatch these past few weeks since "butterfly"
copy me symetry game on a butterfly shaped mat- i layed something down on a spot on my side of the butterfly and the child did the same on the other side
butterfly symetry art (paint one half of butterfly paper and then fold to get same design on other side)

yeah my memory from the first two weeks isnt there and im too lazy to go look in the notebook.

C: color, caterpillar, circus, cereal, castle
1. sorted toys by color
2. color wheel- ive misplaced the paintbrushes so we tried with colored pencils and it really didnt work out well- jen had the great idea of showing your kids color mixing with food coloring instead too make up for this flop. sorry.
3. talked about the importance of eating a rainbow of foods to keep our bdies healthy (used our color wheel plates and some food pictures to put something of each color on our plates)
4. read the Very Hungry Caterpillar while glueing the sequencing cards of the story on our construction paper by the day of the week- you could use the paper to have the kids retell the story putting emphasis on day of the week, number of things he ate each day, or color of food he ate that day
5. acted out the lifecycle of a caterpillar- egg, caterpillar, cocoon (pillow case) and finally butterfly (our cateroillars didnt come in the mail until wed afternoon so hopefully they will still be caterpillars next wed. and we can witness the cocoon and hatching too)
6. added days of the week to our calendar and sang days of the week song to tune of adams family theme song
7. read Olivia saves the circus while glueing cereal in the shape of "c"
8. sorted our weekly words into hard and soft c sounds

D: dance, Daniel, dentist, dolphin, dinosaur

i layed towels out in different shapes: circle, square, triangle, Diamond and we danced aroudn the shape to different kinds of music

distance: made a map of the zoo in Good night gorilla and counted the number of zoo keeper steps it took to get from cage to cage

http://www.bibleforchildren.org/PDFs/english/Daniel%20and%20the%20Lions%20Den%20English.pdf watched the story of daniel in the lions den

discussed dentist office visits and watched a youtube video of a kids first visit

scrubbed the bottom of an empty small coke bottle with baking soda and water to mimic brushing our teeth

snack: oreos and apple slices- oour dentist wants us to eata snacks that keep our teeth clean like apples but its ok to eat snacks like oreos we just have to brush our teeth really good

read Dolphins first day

dug in the sand to find dinosaurs like real scientist
polka-dotted a letter "D"

read Elves and the shoe maker
answered some riddles about body parts that start with e like ear eye and elbow
everyones favorite was singing hokey pokey using the e boday parts and additional part including the ever popular " bum" (just in case you are wondering if they are really singing about shaking your bum all about)
did exercise to a kids workout dvd- hillarious! they lasted about 5 min but all did really well
centers:
ewww bag- bag of slime featured on play at home moms for practice writing "E"
elephant face building with shapes of construction paper
egg match- match the uppercase letter to the lower case letter
color sort (no correlation to e week)
counting beans in egg carton
felt board story of Esther found at chocolate on my cranium
discussion of emperors followed by slide show of china
made china flag by looking at a picture and putting everything in the right place on their copy with no help from me