We have had a jam-packed couple of days and I have fallen a little behind on blogging because of it. I’m going to attempt to combine all the awesomeness of these past couple of days into one blog post – we’ll see what happens!
The past couple of days have been a bit challenging as far as keeping the preschool division occupied in my house. Here are some of the things we have done…..
We worked on sequencing with these cute little puzzles I found at Target in the dollar bin! (PS there were about 9 puzzles included for a buck – awesome deal!)
We also worked on letter recognition with the letter B. We glued craft balls (because they start with B of course) to the big letter B.
In math we are continuing to work on place value while introducing the concept of regrouping. This week we have used a few different methods of learning this concept.
We have used our base ten block set to “build” numbers and regroup them in addition problems. That worked for a while and then I started to lose him. Fruit Loops to the rescue! (And pretzel sticks) We traded our “ones” cubes for Fruit Loops and our “tens” sticks for pretzel sticks. We “built” our numbers like this – the problem in the picture was 28 + 7:
First, we added all of our Fruit Loops together and if we had enough we could trade for a pretzel stick (they cost 10 Fruit Loops). Whatever Fruit Loops we had left over became our “ones” for our answer. Second, we added our pretzel sticks to come up with our “tens” for the answer.
To make things a little more simple for my little learner I made a “regrouping” mat for him to use. Here is how we used it:
First, we built our numbers – in the picture we have 26 + 8. We had 2 pretzel sticks in the top “tens” box and 6 Fruit Loops in the top “ones” box. We also had 8 Fruit Loops in the middle “ones” box.
Second, we added our "ones” (Fruit Loops) and traded what we could for a “tens” (pretzel stick). Here is what it looked like after the trade (we brought our left over “ones” (Fruit Loops) down to the bottom “ones” box).
Third, we added our “tens” (pretzel sticks) and brought them down to the bottom “tens” box. We then had our answer to the problem 26+8 = 34!
We also took a few turns using our base ten bocks on this mat but the pretzel sticks fit better than the “tens” sticks.
If you would like to download and print out the regrouping math you can find it here.
This week we are learning about the story of Noah’s Ark and one of our activities was making a rainbow – God’s promise. We made our rainbows out of Fruit Loops and glued them on to construction paper. Afterwards, the kids wanted to make cereal necklaces – this was a great fine motor activity for both of them- and it gave me a few minutes to get our next activity lined up!
We’re finishing up our unit on American symbols this week. We made American flags with construction paper shapes and talked about lines and patterns (this was a joint art lesson).
We also learned about the Liberty Bell and made our own!
This week we start our study in music. We are using The Story of the Orchestra and spreading it out over the school year. I made up a comprehension sheet for each week to go along with the reading and music (the book came with a CD). If you would like to download the first week’s sheet for yourself it’s here. We read pagers 7-9 and listened to track number 1.
Part of today’s lesson was to listen to a track of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie with our eyes closed and then draw what we saw as we listened. Here’s my first grader’s take on it: “the girl is riding the horse to go save the boy from the snake”
I was pleasantly surprised by his enthusiasm here. Since his interest had been sparked we talked about the theme song from Star Wars and how that was played by an orchestra. We watched this video on YouTube of an orchestra performing the song – it was a BIG hit with my kiddo!
Until Next Time,
Tessa
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