Pre-K w/ MSA: Letter S

You will have to forgive me, ahead of time, for not having a whole bunch of pictures. It was a very busy and crazy week: first week of Co-Op, another week waiting for our new printer to arrive to replace the old one that did not survive our move from Japan and of course our dryer had to go on the frizz which sent me to the laundry mat to dry our laundry...sigh.

But here I am, Saturday morning determined to blog our way through our Itty-Bitty Bookworm year. Actually, we started 2 weeks ago but Hurricane Earl delayed Co-Op a week and I wanted to keep both schedules synchronized! Below is what we did for Week 1a and 1b, lol

Week 1a: I introduced the Letter S and used The Very Quiet Cricket for our circle time. The kids really enjoyed this book and by the third page they were chanting: "But nothing happened. Not a sound."










Since we were reading an Eric Carle book we decided to make our own colored tissue paper.

We tried painting the tissue paper, but when it dried it was too hard.

My next idea worked really well and is alot easier to clean up with little ones. I took white tissue paper and colored a whole section with a marker. Next, using a paint brush dipped in only water, I blotted the paint brush all over the colored section. Once you section is finished you lift the tissue paper GENTLY off your work area and place it in an area to dry; about an hour. Once dried it is very easy to work with and the colors are bold!!!

The blue section was my test area. I had already blotted the colored area and lifted it up to start drying. The orange area blotted and still needed to be lifted up. Here is the pink area all colored and ready for water. (Note: make sure your work area is water proof and can be wiped up easily because the colors will bleed onto your work surface.) After the tissue paper is dry you can cut it up and let the little ones decorate what ever you have prepared for them. I let CJ glue her colored tissue paper to her letter of the week.(FYI I get my letter templates off of DLTK.)

The number of the week was 1 so we used the bug jar worksheet, provided with the curriculum, and I gave the kids a chance to draw a bug in their jar.

Again, no pictures, but we went on a circle hunt. Then took a 3 inch piece of floss and measured different items to tell if they smaller, the same size or bigger than a cricket. (All ideas from Itty Bitty Bookworm)






Two more books we read and really enjoyed were:

This book is also on You Tube. and

Scholastic has a great lesson plan on similes that I taught to the boys.

On the night I went to prep for our Co-Op, I realized that I had returned all the book except Quick as a Cricket to the library.Since I would only have Quick as a Cricket I modified the lesson plan a little. I acted out different emotions and had the children guess how I was feeling and then encouraged them to also pretend that they were mad, sad, happy, ect. I introduced our  Letter of the Week S by having them glue confetti circles to the lower case s and coloring the capital S on the template I got off of DLTK. I utilitzed the Identifying Letters worksheet that came with my Itty-Bitty Bookworm curriculum and it was a hit. I really didn't expect the kids to be able to find the S's but they did and went on to circle all the other letters because they were having so much fun!!! To to my amazement we actually ran out of time so I had to combine two activities and had the kids color their # 1 leaf, glue "one" bug to it and then glue it onto their bug jar.

Itty-Bitty Bookworm has made teaching a breeze so far. I am always pleased with the amount of ideas and printouts that are provided and I love the fact that I get my lesson plans a whole month ahead of time. This makes planning much much easier!!!!! Another thing I really love about Itty-Bitty Bookworm is that it is seperated into 2 age groups: 18-36 months, the Bailey Curriculum and 3-5 year olds, the Bo Curriculum.
There is a great resource page with alot of extras to go with the Itty-Bitty Bookworm Curriculum and she even has a blog called Raising Itty-Bitty Bookworms. I do hope you will come back and check out what we do next week as we use another Eric Carle book, introduce the letter Tt and talk about Ordinal Numbers.

For those who like the more traditional method of going through the alphabet from A to Z you can check out what we did last year or head on over to the archives at Totally Tots. And I always love suggestions so if you have something to share, PLEASE leave your idea in the comment area!!!!!