10 timid Little Ghosts - Props

We have been reading 10 Timid Ghosts by Jennifer O'Connell for the past 2 weeks in the classroom. The children love this story. I guess the story has mesmerised them because it represents everything scary about Halloween: witch, ghosts, cats, rats, vampires, skeletons etc.. It is spooky without being frightening and it got their attention straight away. The rhyming and repetitive prose is catchy and easy  to memorise making it fun, while the illustrations are really colourful and detailed. 

More phonics

Remember this post this post last year regarding our pre-reading activities?   The children were practising their sounds by using a box containing items representing words starting with the sounds in question. 

We only went as far as the first box last year, as this was something new to our classroom. And yeh yeh... I am proud to announce that the children have moved on to our 2nd box this week. 

 As i explained before, it is important to understand that at that stage children do not need to know the name of the letters. They just need to know their phonic sound. Most of them will actually have assimilated both name and sound, but this is not  requirement. The children love these phonic boxes and this is such a great reward for me... Believe me: finding objects was not an easy task and it took me a good deal of time and patience! So seeing the box being so well used and so popular makes it all worth it!! 

Where is my name tag gone?

We are moving on slowly but surely  in our literacy program and this week, as part of our effort to teach the children to recognise their own names, we removed the pictures attached to their name tags. Each morning the children are to put their name tag up on the board as they arrive in class. Some of them were puzzled yesterday when they realised that their tags were different. Most of them picked the right one straight away while another few were still struggling a little bit but I think we are on the right track. 

This is what their new name tag look like ....

And this is what the younger kids's tags still look like.... See the progression? 

Clever Little Snowmen.....

For this post, I am referring you to an activity we did last year with the children. Have a look here. What is it about? in a nutshell, I precut white circles and write letters on them. I also precut hats for snowmen. The children must find the letters of their name and place them on a blue sheet in the correct order. This is quite a cute pre-reading activity. But be well prepared in advance and be patient. The cutting part takes a while and the children really take their time when gluing the circles down! So plan your activity well if you don't want to be overwhelmed. I chose a quieter session with bigger kids and had everything organised in different containers (circles in one, eyes in another, hats in a 3rd one, scarves in a 4th ...). You will also need a lot of room as you need to spread all the circles with the letters on a table to allow the children to recognise their letters. 

This year, I added a  little twist to the exercise and asked the children to count the number of letters in everybody's names. Names which had the same amount of letters were placed on top of one another. . One child placed the sand paper number cards under the names and then the children placed them in order from bigger to smaller. They were able to see straightaway whose name was the longest or the shortest. The children kept undoing their work and redoing it and this was great fun to watch them working as a team! 

Another pre-reading activity

Here is a little activity we have done these past 2 days. Some children can already recognise their names on their name tags without even referring to the picture attached to it. Some need a bit more practice. This exercise proved to be perfect: the children had to glue the chick peas or split red lentils onto the traced letters of their names. They really had to concentrate hard! Great way to develop their visual memory! (I am sorry if all the photos are crooked! I don't know how to fix this problem. The pictures are perfect in my folder on the computer but for some reason, they come up the wrong way sometimes when I use them on my blog!!)

 

 

Caution: Floor mats in use here!!!

Here is what went on this week in our classroom. A bit of this and a bit of that....

Remember my recent post in our literacy activities? Well, here are a  few pictures of the children in action with the sound booklets, the sandpaper letters and objects and the sandpaper letters witht pictures:

I found these exercises so beneficial to the children. We always revise our sounds at circle time and introduce new ones too. Of course, this go hand in hand with the sandpaper letters during individual lessons. However, I have found that, taken out of these 2 contexts, if some children are asked to recognise a sound, they are lost. Practising their sounds this way was so enticing and they really liked it. It helped a few of them to make the association between a word, its initial sound and the written sound. I am really glad I spent so much time making the booklets and looking for objects around my house for our box (believe me, it was probably the hardest part.. though my own kids thought it was fun... LIke a scavenger hunt inside the house!)

What else did we do?

Punching and gluing

Tracing, colouring and cutting exercise

Jigsaws

More jigsaws

The above photo shows how the children are using our floor mats in the classroom. To be honest, over the past 2 weeks, I have been reminding the children of the importance of working with their mats (either on the floor or at the table). This was a principle of the Montessori method we had gone over at the beginning of the year but some children had either completely forgotten the rules and forgot to use the mats altogether or they were not using them appropriately (e.g:  carrying their work and mat separately). So, I reintroduced the lesson on the use of mats in our classroom. The mats provide children with a delineated work space of their own where they can work. I explained again to the children that a mat represents their own space of work. Nobody can interfere with their work on the mat, touch it or alter it. Children have to learn and show respect for their peers’ work. Basically, the purpose of the mats is to reinforce Montessori's principle of "freedom within limits". I showed them how to walk around the mats and how to place their work on the mats. They were reminded that (as I said above), they are not allowed to join a classmates’ work unless they have be given permission by that child. The children have been more careful thanks to these reminders and you know what… their work and concentration have already improved so much.. Why didn’t I do this before?

Winterland!

Here are a few winter activities we have been doing in our classroom. None of them are very original but the children absolutely loved them.

This is a new Maths activity on our shelf. I found it on Kidssoup (they offer great preschool resources and I do recommend them highly). SO what do you do with it? The child picks a card, counts the snowflakes and places the wooden peg on the corresponding number. There is no control of error. This is the only thing I don't really like (and as a Montessori teacher, control of error is very important to encourage self-esteem and independence). So, I basically show each child how to play this game. I then tell him/her to do it on his/her own but I ask for them to call me when they are finished for me to check their work. Two of them had a go at it and believe me, they didn't forget to call me back... they were so proud of their work!!

I have replaced a few tools on our play dough tray and added a few items. I showed the children how they could make snowmen by flattening the dough with the roller and by cutting circles with the different sized objects I provided them with. They then added buttons, scraf scarf etc... God, they are now fighting for this activity!! I love it because it overlaps several fields in our curriculum: fine motor sills development, language,  art and crafts and even maths as I ask them to count all the buttons they are using on their snowmen!

Using some styrofoam nuggets used for packing, we made some igloos with the children. We have started talking about Antartica  (I will write another post about this) and the children were very excited about making their own igloo!!

And finally, as we are practising recognising/reading/writing our names, we wrote our names using paper cirlces and piling them up on top of one another to make snowmen. Some of the children are a step ahead of others and can now write their name all on their own. But they still enjoyed this exercise. This reinforces letter recognition and is a fun pre-writing or pre-reading activity. Try it!

Learning about the different parts of a plant

I found a worksheet from Kidssoup about the different parts of a plant.  My little ones cannot write the labels in the blanks  so I decided to adapt it to our needs. I typed the words on my laptop and printed them.

As you can see above, I made a sample which I laminated (so I can reuse it next year again). I am also using this sample at circle time when we talk and learn about the different parts of plants. I have placed the laminated page on a tray along with blank sheets, the labels kids will have to recognise (pre-reading exercise) and a glue stick.

To do this work the child must lay the labls on the paper and then have the teacher check.  Once their work is checked they may glue the labels in place and then color their paper.

To reinforce their knowledge of the different parts of a plant, I also have introduced a little game called "what's missing?" (also available on Kidssoup). The children have to figure out what part of the plant is missing on the picture, point at it and say the appropriate word out loud. A great way to get their little brains working and it is part of the Montessori 3 period lesson.



More pre-reading activities/games

Though I believe firmly in the Montessori method of education, I know it is very important to present the 3-4 year old children with  several pre-reading activity before introducing them to any Montessori Language materials. These "pre-reading" activities can be completed without any knowledge or understanding of the letter/sound relationship. The photos below show four of the "pre-reading" activities that I have placed on my "first" language shelf.

This photo shows a set of "go-together" matching cards.  Go-togethers games are considered pre-reading activities because they require children to think carefully about how things are connected to each other. When they willlearn to read in primary school, they will have to have a strong sense of what goes together: for instance, the sound /b/ goes with te letter "b" or /b/ goes with the word "banana". Not that easy when you think of it! In that sense, opposite matching cards (see 2nd photo below) are also a pre-reading game because the children have to analyze what is different but related at the same time. This is a very important type of comprehension activity for them.

The third photo below shows a set of part-whole cards. It is quite populr among the young kids because it represent some of their favourite TV characters.  What do they have to do? They have to take a part of a body ( a head, a tummy or a pair of feet) and match them to its related parts. This game introduces the relationship that exists between a "part" and "the whole". This is a mathematical concept but it is also important in reading and writing. When a child reads, he/she has to understand that letters are parts of a word, words are parts of a sentence etc... 

Sequencing is the ability to put the events of a story in the order in which they occurred. “Teaching sequencing to early learners is important because logical order of thinking is fundamental to reading and everyday life," says  Brenda Strickland, author of  Year Round reading. So sequencing is a  pre-reading skill that preschoolers can practice with the activity shown below:

For some children, sequencing can be a hard concept to grasp, especially when they are trying to tell a story. Using good key words like "first," "next," "then," and "finally," we cue the child as to what is coming next.

Using names for pre-reading activities

As I read somewhere before (sorry, I can’t find the source of the quotation!), “much of a child's initial understanding of words, letters, and sounds is tied to the word that means the most to them...........their own name!”. Many phonetic and phonological skills can actually be introduced using names and this is why we put such an emphasis on names at an early start. I thought it would be a good idea to show you how we do it in our preschool.

All parents are aware that we put a strong emphasis on name recognition from the minute they step into the preschool, as the first thing they see is the children’s hangers labelled with their name.

For smaller kids, it is a picture with their name below it. Children love having their own pictures as it recognises their individuality and made them feel like they belong at the same time. 

Parents would also know that we ask the children to pick their name among others and put it on the green board as they come in the classroom. Again, the younger kids would first recognise the picture before the name itself. After a few months, however, they usually have become so familiar with their name tag that they do not need the picture anymore.

Each  September, I take a close-up photo of each child's face. I glue the appropriate name on each photo and place it beside the picture representing the month they were born in as shown below (I am sorry for the poor quality of the photo. I couldn't do a close up... I have to protect the privacy of each child in our preschool):

We also have a game they are really fond of: the “Name game”. We all sit in a circle at circle time or before going outside. I pick a card with a name of it and hold it up. When a child sees his/her name, he/she stands up. Once we have done everybody’s name, we stand up and walk in circle slowly, singing “will you meet a friend of mine, will you meet a friend of mine, will you meet a friend of mine? This is my friend _____” (sung to the tune of “Mary had a little lamb”). At that point I throw a name card into the middle of the circle.  The child whose name it is grabs the card and returns to his/her place in the circle.  We keep going until all the children have had a go.  They LOVE this game!! It involves them and boost their sense of belonging.

I have a few more activities to talk about but I have to take more pictures first. Keep in touch.