I've Up and Moved

I have moved my blog to a new location.  You can now find it at www.teachingthelittlepeople.com.  

Um, whatever happened to "This Spells Cat"?

Oh, the things those Little People say.  Today we have the letter bears out, and one Little Person pulled me over to them excitedly.  "Hey, look what I made" he said with pride.

He showed me this line of letters excitedly:

"Look, " he said.  "This spells 'headshot'".

Wow.  Headshot.  What ever happened to "cat" and "dog" and "Mommy?"

Making Weather Charts in Preschool

Last week our theme was Seasons and Weather.  Actually, it turned into more of a "Seasons and Weather" theme, because there was just a lot going on with that alone.   Plus, the last time I tried to talk about a season  I realized that nothing outside was reinforcing what I was saying to the Little People anyway.  So I decided to leave the Winter talk until it actually is acting like winter outside, and focused on the just the weather.  Because as we all know, no matter if it is exactly what we are expecting or not, we always have weather.

I decided before the week began to cover one different type of weather each day on Monday through Thursday, and then review on Friday.  And believe it or not, the weather outside was very cooperative.  On Monday we were focusing on sunny and it was sunny.  On Tuesday we did cloudy and it was cloudy.  Wednesday was Rain Day and amazingly - it was rainy.   Thursday was Partly Cloudy, and it was - well, it was just cloudy.  However, three out of four is not bad at all.

Our big project for the week was to make a weather chart, and so we made one section a day as we talked about the different types of weather.

On Monday we made our sunny pictures.  I put out die-cut suns and the Little People spooned paint on them. I then placed a piece of waxed paper on top and then they squished the paint all around, leaving suns that looked like this:

Later in the week the Little People added sun rays to them.  I must admit that I really had a hard time when some of them started repainting their suns and covering up their previous fantastic paint jobs, but I took a deep breath and let it go.

Tuesday was cloudy.  We made clouds by painting gray paint onto white paper with shower poofs.  Later I cut these papers into clouds (since the Little People aren't big into cutting yet).

Wednesday was Rain Day, so we provided umbrellas, raindrops and markers and let them go to work:

On Partly Cloudy Day the materials were die-cut suns, cotton balls, and lots of glue.  I find that I don't have a picture of those, except for on the finished products:

(Sorry those picture are so blurry.  I'm needing to make my pictures much smaller right now because I have apparently run out of picture space on Blogger.)

I decided to go with the printed labels for weather names because a)they look nice and b)I can save this computer file for next year.  Hurray for saving time!

The arrows are cut from fun foam.  I made the hole in the middle of the chart with an "everywhere hole punch" from my scrapbooking stash.

Even though these were a lot of work to finish up, I think they turned out wonderfully.  We used our sample pictures to make one for our classroom, so hopefully the kids will take the language they hear every day during weather time home and use it with their own chart.

A New Week In Preschool

It was a pretty good Monday in Preschool today, all things considered.  We had kind of a crazy week last week with all of the rain and inside-ness, but we were able to go outside today.  Everyone seemed to be in a fairly good and docile mood, which of course always helps things along.

One of my Little People did start their school day off to a little bit of a late start, due to his little brother having a "Terrible Two" episode.  It turns out that little Johnny picked up his 6-week old sister from where she was napping on the couch - and put her in the (thankfully unlit) fireplace.  So, while our day started off pretty well, it wasn't that way so much for little Johnny - and the baby, of course.

We largely went about our day normally, dawdling on our way to lunch and saying things on the playground  like, "No, I really don't think worms like going down the slide."

We're talking about the letter T and Teddy Bears, so we have all sort of fun things of bear things ahead of us.

In fact, here are a bunch of bears from our house, getting ready to travel to school tomorrow.  The bears live in a cabinet in our house that unfortunately smells a little old, so they always need a good airing and Febreze-ing when they emerge from their in-cabinet hibernation.

In general, I have high hopes for the week ahead.   As do the bears, who get to live in the sunshine - and fresh air for awhile.