Little Campers!

It's time to link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching Five for Friday linky to showcase my week.  We began our camping unit and we are having a blast with our activities.  Camping just may be one of my favorite themes.  It reminds me of camping when I was little, plus it's priceless to see the excitement of my little learners as they explore and learn.

I hauled in a bunch of camping items from home, including this old Christmas tree stand, which worked out perfectly to make our 'campfire'.

 The emerging readers couldn't wait to get inside with flashlights and books!

Speaking of books, this little number is PERFECT for a camping unit.

I read it with the lights off and a flashlight.  The shadows showed up great on our team board {which was turned off}.

 Then, the brave little campers took turns getting inside the tent while I held up a black die cut and created a shadow with a flashlight.  They had to guess what the image was.  Guess what they played during free time???

We also played a shadow match memory game, which they loved.

We made cute little campers

 by cutting, gluing, and adding the number of stars to represent our age.

I love how they turned out!

Another activity designed to help increase memory skills was putting out various camping equipment, having a little learner hide in the tent, and then take one, two, or even three items away and have them tell what's missing.

What's so great about this activity is you can very easily differentiate it by the number of items put out and taken away.

What's camping without s'mores?

We made some by layering graham crackers, chocolate, and marshmallows of the same shape.

 We also counted marshmallows {white pony beads} on sticks {pipe cleaners}

and then 'roasted' them over the fire.

This math activity was super fun and I was able to really challenge their thinking by rolling the die/dice and having them figure how want more was needed to make 10.  We also worked on counting on, which can be tricky for my pre-k sweeties.

And, of course we did some good old fashioned dramatic play with all the camping stuff.  

This by far was the most popular center this week.  The play schemes they came up with were quite involved.  I was so proud and thrilled.

 I added lots of new activities to my camping pack on TPT.  It's 155 pages long and will be on sale through the weekend.   You can check out the updates HERE or by clicking on the picture below.

How was your week?  Link and let us know!

Thanks for reading.  Have a great day!  :)

Five for ????

What the what?  It's Sunday and I'm just now getting to my Five for Friday.  Where does the time go?  Anyway, we had so much fun with our bug unit this week.  I can't wait to showcase it for you.

After reading 'In the Tall, Tall, Grass' by Denise Fleming, we sequenced the bugs/animals in the story on a green sentence strip….

 and then we snipped the top of the strip to make in look like grass….

and voila, headbands!

Are they not the cutest little learners, ever?!?!

We used this little guy to help us label the parts of an ant.

They learned lots of new vocabulary, like thorax and abdomen!

 We 'caught' some bugs, looked at them under a 'magnifying glass', and then put them in the correct jar, according to shape.  This was a great way to review shapes and add in a few new ones, like crescent and pentagon.

For a review of our letters and letter sounds, we used fly swatters to help identify them.

For a fun little brain break movement activity, we drew a bug action card and then acted it out.

As you can see by these faces, they had SO much fun!

We also made dragonflies by cutting wax paper wings and then gluing them on a strip of paper along with circles and ovals.  

We then cut the paper to make antenna.  Pretty cute, if you ask me.

If you are looking for lots of buggy ideas, you can find the ones posted here and many more in my 'Buggy for Bugs' pack HERE. 

It's 50% off right now!

Be sure to tell us about your week at Doodle Bugs Teaching Five for Friday linky!

Show and Tell!

I am super excited to link up with Stephanie from Forever in 5th for her April Show and Tell linky.  The purpose of this linky is just like it sounds, a good old fashioned show and tell.  :)  So, let's get this party started!

My spring break was a couple of week's ago {seems like it was FOREVER ago!  Isn't it funny how that always happens?!?}  Anyway, I went to Austin, Texas and had a blast!

As you can tell, we toured the Deep Eddy Vodka distillery, which was amazing.  We stayed downtown and traveled up and down 6th street, even 'dirty 6 :)  It was one of those vacation where you cram as much stuff in as you can, but at the same time fly by the seat of your pants with lots of spontaneity.  It was PERFECT and gave my the summer bug.

This year my class was moved to an elementary building from our early childhood center.  I wasn't quite sure how this would all go down as it was gonna all be new.  Let me just say it has exceeded all my expectations.  The amount of growth I have seen with my students has been astounding.  Plus, they have the added benefit of getting used to an elementary building, but still in the cocoon of preschool.  Last week, our pre-k class was included in kindergarten's PTA performance.  The littles sang six songs before the kindergarteners took the stage.  They rocked it!  I was so proud.  :)

The weather is warming and I love it!  One of my sisters from another mister and I headed to City Market to take in the sites and sounds.  I love that place!

 At school we just finished our frog theme and now we are beginning a bug unit.  Love the spring and all the cool things you can do!  Here's a peek at some of our fun.

We used fly swatters to identify letters of the alphabet and swat at letter sounds.  I am currently finishing up my Bug Pack and hopefully will have it ready to go by the end of this week!

Well, that's it for my Show and Tell!  Be sure to check Forever in Fifth for more fun.

Thanks for reading!  Have a great day.  :)

Fantastic Frog Fun!

As you can tell by the title of this post, we began a frog unit of study this week and it has been fun filled!  In fact, we didn't get all our activities completed, so check back next week for round two!

This little art project kinda came all together by accident…

 Paper plates were painted green and once they were dry, the littles cut a triangle shape out.

Pipettes were used to drop liquid paint on a coffee filter for the flower.

One little one wanted to paint another plate blue to represent the water.  He definitely is an outside the box thinker, as you will see later in this post.

My sister turned me on to a really cool art website, even for preschool age learners.  {Art for Kids Hub}  There I found a directed drawing for a frog.  They were so engaged and were really proud of their frogs!  We used Cray pas crayons to color them in and then cut around the frogs.

Remember the outside the box thinker?  Well, he also wanted to draw eggs, a tadpole and froglet to add to his frog and lily pad.  I am constantly amazed by this little one's love for learning!  He is a sponge and then takes it a step beyond.  LOVE :)

We also had so much fun with frogs on the light table and in the sensory table.

I added clear water beads, foam lily pads, plastic flies and frogs.

It's their favorite place to go these days.

Our math learning activities this week included:

 counting frogs on lily pads, deciding which one had more,

 and then using an alligator mouth symbol to show greater than/ less than.  They really are nailing this concept.

I also have a set of plastic logs and frogs that my sweeties used to count and make patterns.

 I always love it when my little ones do these amazing learning activities during free choice time.

We reviewed shapes by cutting and gluing frogs above lily pads of the same shapes.

Our language activities this week included first using lily pads, frogs and flies to practice position words.

Then the little learners glued a fog on each page of this interactive emergent reader.

We have been really working on many phonemic awareness activities, including rhyming words.

 Here, little ones put a frog on a log that had the matching rhyming picture.

 We also reviewed beginning letter sounds by playing a memory game where the learners turned over cards to match letters on frogs to beginning sounds on lily pads.

If you are interested, you can check out my newest learning pack on frogs HERE.  

If you've already purchased this pack, please re-download!  I've added some additional pages.  :)

 Something we did this week not related to frogs, but just as fun is our play group.  Play group is a weekly favorite!  Here we blew small feathers to each other and caught them with paper plates.

 You can tell by the look on their faces how much fun that had doing this!

We also 'face painted' {pretend} on each other.  These groups help bond us and make us feel safe and like a school family.  

Spring break was last week and I took a trip to Austin, Texas.  Talk about a FUN place!  We did so many amazing things.

One place we stumbled onto was Voodoo Doughnut…...

Seriously, these things should be illegal!

Well, that was my week in recap.  I hope yours was great, too.  Link up with Five for Friday at Doodle Bugs Teaching to share.

Thanks for reading!  Have a great day.  :)