January language activities

I have so many stages of language development in my classroom that I'm trying to offer a broad spectrum of activities to grow skills.  I'm always on the hunt for fun review games that focus on letters or concepts that we've been discussing.    

Here are a few language activities we've done this month:

Review: Find the Inchworms (plus "Jellybeans" AND the Alphabet!)

I brought out our magnets and inchworms again and this time added our "jellybeans" (see this post) and magnetic alphabet pieces.  We had fun catching the objects with the magnetic wands and rummaging through the grass to find jellybeans: ) 

When it was time to clean up this center at the end of the week, I led my students in a group activity to sort the items.  We went around the circle catching inchworms, jelly beans, and alphabet letters and sorted them into the correct bowl.  After the items were sorted it was a cinch to put everything away in it's proper place.  (I love being sneaky with clean up!)

Alphabet Mittens:  

I believe the mitten pattern that I used is from a Mailbox book that I have.  (I made them a number of years ago).  To prepare, I hung the mittens in alphabet order from a string and clothespins.  For a group game I took off random mittens and passed them out to the students.  We sang through the alphabet and figured out which letters were missing.  The game was lots of fun when Miss Eileen got a little silly if a letter is not there ; )  I think we played this game at least four or five times -over the course of two weeks - and sang through the alphabet at least 20 times!

Shaving Cream Writing:  

For my younger students I tried using shaving cream to practice our letters.  Since this was an introduction to playing in shaving cream, it ended up being more about the experience than the writing.  Now that we've experienced it, I'm hoping next time I try this we can be a little more intentional about writing current letter we're focusing on or our names, etc.

Ii...eye...aye...Ii

We had some inchworm fun to help learn about letter "Ii".  Thanks to Deborah from Teach Preschool I had some activities at my fingertips - great for a busy time of year : )

Big "I" with Inchworms - Hiding in the Grass (Inspiration here) :  We glued small green rectangles on our capital "I's".  We tried to glue the worms bending, but most of my students liked the ease of gluing them flat.  

After we were done with the glue, we painted grass for the worms to hide in, using the tines of a fork.

Find the Inchworms! (Inspiration here):  I can't believe I've never thought of using pipe cleaner and magnets together - great combo!  For this center, I put some grass (green and brown gift bag filler, found a the dollar store) in a container.  I added some inchworms (green pipe cleaner) and magnetic wands. 

My kiddos LOVED this activity.  I'm going to bring it back in a few weeks and add some magnetic alphabet letters to the mix for some review fun. 

Other activities in our classroom:

Nativity Building Center:  I've had a plastic Nativity set mixed with our blocks for the last four weeks and it's still a popular spot to play.  Every once in a while baby Jesus disappears (he's a hot item!) but he is eventually retrieved to place in whatever version of a stable is being constructed. 

Christmas Card Art:  I had a huge bag of Christmas card fronts donated to our school.  I put the cards, construction paper, scissors, glue and markers out at our art table for the kiddos to be creative with.  My smallest students are just getting comfortable with using scissors and glue so it was great practice for them. I love seeing their creativity start to blossom when the use of art tools becomes more familiar.

alligator soup

One of the core words in my life is "balance."  I'm extremely fond of living in the middle between the extremes, using a bit of each perspective to create my own recipe for life.  Our preschool program has developed out of this philosophy.  

 

When I began working at our school I was introduced to ABeka's preschool curriculum.  It is a curriculum for Christian schools (written way back when) that our school has used for many years.  In my opinion, the program in its purest form is very structured and way too intense for preschool and  it definitely does not fit the current trend for play-based learning.  As much as I dislike the intensity, I've chosen to keep the curriculum.  This gives our students some continuity when they move on in our school (our Kindergarten and other grades use parts of the curriculum also).    Over the years, I've let the curriculum become the base of our program and  I've mixed in other ingredients to go with it - balancing between a "structured school" and "play" environment.   

Some things to know about how I structure my class activities:

• I use Abeka's curriculum for parts of my activites
• My class is a mix of 3's & 4's - I try to offer activities for various developmental levels as well as activities that can be adjusted based on skill level
• We are a "letter of the week" program - not that the rest of the alphabet gets left out of the mix - but it gives us a focus for each week.  Our 3's focus on 2 letters for 2 weeks and and then have a review week
• We have monthly themes - which gives us even more to do : )  Sometimes it is a bit much so I choose to focus on what my students are interested in or what I'm excited about teaching

That being said, here are some of the activities we did for week 3 (focus letter "Aa"):

Sensory Table, Alphabet Soup: foam alphabet letters, beans, spoons, and bowls (inspired by playinghouseinmaryland.blogspot.com)

Alligator Eggs: large plastic eggs (always a winner!), laminated baby alligator cut-outs, other pics that begin with "A", metallic gift filler (from dollar store)

 Alligator Count: alligator magnets (clip art copied on card-stock, cut out, attach magnet on back), number magnets

 Alligator "A's" (inspired by notimeforflashcards.com) they turned out so cute! (For projects that require glue I put white glue in a paint container, add a little water, and have students apply with a paint brush)