October 16-19

Books we read this week:

Duck and Goose Find a Pumpkin

It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown!

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves!

Scaredycrow

The Color Monster 

(We used the theme of this book for some interactive and creative classroom experiences - more to come next week!)

One of the topics of our fall books and experiences is apples. We've discussed different children's trips to pick apples and the different kinds of apples there are to pick and taste. After much discussion, we narrowed it down to red, green and yellow apples as the main ones we have all experienced. We decided to create our own apple trees in the classroom, which gave us a great opportunity to observe the children's cutting skills. This is a developing fine motor skill in preschool and we have the children cut out as much of their own materials as they can. We work with the children to put their fingers in the right place, turn their hand in the right direction and make slow and aimed cuts. We used the concepts of apples and apple trees for this cutting practice, which helped the children make an immediate connection to the pictures. 

Once each child cut out the three different strips they naturally began to describe the three different apples. These descriptions focused on the key different between them: Color. These descriptions logically led to some of the children sorting their apples into color piles. Math skills like sorting are naturally practiced during children's manipulative play. When we see the children doing the math work on their own we're quick to point it out and identify the math skills they are using. In this case when a child said "I made a red, yellow and green pile" we responded with "yes you did - you sorted your apples by color!"

The next day we created our apple trees. The children used the visual cues and labels to determine which color apple to glue to each tree. We turned this experience into one with lots of movement since we need space to move, gather around a table, remove apples from our bins and glue them on the trees. 

And finally, we added additional labels to our apple trees to indicate the different parts of the tree (both those that we can see and those that would could not see). These labels were color-coded to give the children another tool to help them "read" each word. Once each word was read as a group, the children placed them in the appropriate place on the trees. Our final step was to read each label while we pointed to the part of the tree, and discuss its characteristics.