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...

Preschool

READING...


Our main reading program comes through "Hooked on Phonics" and "ABC Reading Eggs", both focus particularly on phonics, but also integrate sight words. We add in some BOB books every now and then, as well. We have been moving pretty slowly in terms of reading. I really don't want Smiley to get burned out, he is so young! However, I think it is more me holding him back rather than him not being ready... He really loves reading as long as it is on his terms... He loves ABC Reading Eggs and would probably do it more often. He learned several sight words now, "see", "and", "the" and I want to make sure he is solid in them and not move too quickly...

I came across this cool, FREE reading program a few weeks ago, which combines phonics and sight words. It is perfect for us. The first unit covers exactly what Smiley is working on right now :)

He is still OBSESSED with CARS (and can't wait for CARS 2 to come out in a few weeks). I yelled out a word and his car (I forgot the name of the car, oops), had to find it and drive on it...

We then went apple by apple and Smiley read the words. He does great sounding them out :)

We then used this cool work sheet and Smiley dot painted the correct words. He loved this. Do you think he pushed his paint hard enough ;)

We then did this apple page with our dot marker as well. He was supposed to use two different colors, based on which word family the words belonged to, but he insisted to just use one color...

BUG THEME...

I have been majorly slacking on our bug unit. I hope life slows down soon and I get to pick it back up! Smiley still talks A LOT about bees though, so he definitely remembers :)

Here we built a bug with a toy that we recently got at a consignment sale.

MATH...

I am trying to add some more math to our preschool. He does really well with counting and has one-to-one correspondance down pat. We are now working on simple addition problems. I took advantage of his love for cars and came up with this simple math game...

It was Smiley's idea to actually match the cars by color ;)

PLAY...

Most of ours days still consist of lots of play, of course. The math game quickly changed into a street building game...

Smiley even made street signs for his cars ;)

He's quite creative at storing his cars as well ;)

This is the first face I saw Smiley draw :)

The weather has been so nice that we spent a lot of time playing outside as well. (he insisted on wearing his helmet the entire time we were on the playground...)