Preschool ~ Butterflies and Snails

BUTTERFLIES...
We completed our study on butterflies this week. Our caterpillars had formed into chrysalis last week...

... and ALL 5 of them transformed into beautiful painted lady butterflies :)

We fed them flowers, which we sprinkled with a bit of sugar water, and orange slices and kept them for a few days.

We wrote and colored in our journal, where we have been keeping track of all the changes our caterpillars went through...

We went to a butterfly pavillion to see even more butterflies (and caterpillars, and eggs, and chrysalis)...

Then it was time to let them go...

To finish up our insect theme, I made the kids a sensory bin with rice and plastic insects (insect toob). They loved it. Rice definitely creates quite a mess though, so it may be a while before we do this again...

SNAILS...

We added a quick unit on snails this week as well. Smiley has been extremely interested in snails lately. We look for them every single morning :) One day this week, I let the kids collect a couple of snails. We made a snail habitat (we filled a plastic bucket with grass and lettuce) and observed the snails for a day. We went to the library and got several non-fiction books on snails...

I printed a snail and the kids painted it with water color.

Once the snails were dry, the kids had fun decorating them...

READING...

We used You Can Read, Unit 2 and Ready2Read, Unit 2 to work on reading this week, in addition to Hooked on Phonics and ABC Reading Eggs.

We focused on the -ig family this week. Using several activities from Ready2Read...

and then read our corresponding -ig book from Hooked on Phonics. Smiley read this book a couple of times and then re-read books 1 and 2 (-at and -ag).

Smiley really enjoys hands-on activities, so I am trying to incorporate fun, hands-on work whenever I can. We used these fun ice cream cones from Ready2Read. I used a file folder with velcro, so Smiley could mix it up and create different ice cream cones for us to "eat.

Smiley loves his cars, so we incorporate them a lot into our reading time :)

The sight words we focused on this week were "can" and "you". I chose to only do two new words this week... We colored our caterpillar words (from Ready2Read).

Sight word search with dot markers from You Can Read... We also used the playdough mats to trace our sight words with playdough (sorry no pictures).

Smiley loved coloring his two sight words with this glittery paint. Rubbing it in with his fingers was great fun! The printables are from Ready2Read as well...