Yay for the first day of Pre-K Summer Camp. Just a little background information... I decided to offer this workshop series as a way to help children and families as they prepare for the transition from preschool and home to kindergarten. There are many transitions in life, but this is one of the biggies. Preschool IS preparation for the transition by its nature, however I try really hard to let the end of preschool be just that, the end of preschool. I hate to "cheat" the end of preschool by totally focusing on kindergarten. This series of classes lets us focus on 4 main parts of the transition, as well as skills that will be mighty handy when we start big school!
5-4-3-2-1, Blast off for Kindergarten! Each child found their name on our bulletin broad when they first arrived. During circle time, we talked about bring a good friends, and what the Bible says about being a good friend. We made a list of what good friends do. Then we read the book Chrysanthemum, by Kevin Henkes. She is a little mouse who goes off to school for the first time and runs into some bullies. Not to worry, a nice teacher comes along to save the day. This book was a good way to talk about how important it is to be a good friend, and use nice words.
During centers the children had the opportunity to "cook" their own snack. (see previous post)
We also had a formal writing lesson. We wrote stories about how to be a good friend.
Many people wonder how you do a formal writing lesson with preschoolers, who are one so many different levels. It is really not as hard as it sounds. Through modeling, we are reaching each learner where they are. Some children are working on drawing people, some are developing a setting, and many are writing sentences using sounds and sight words. It really is a neat process to watch unfold. The sentence accompanying the illustration pictured above says, "I can be nice to my friends".
We were able to squeeze in just a little time for playing outside. We were so surprised to see that our tomatoes were ready to harvest.
Then we dug potatoes!
Time for lunch! We are learning how to manage our lunchboxes, open all of those tricky containers, eat our sandwiches FIRST, and clean up. We also started talking about things that we can save, and things that will spoil if we put them back in our lunchboxes. Since many kids will be eating food purchased in the lunchroom, we will be playing some fun balancing games with cafeteria trays later in the month.
For our math lesson we thought back to the story of Chrysanthemum. She has 13 letters in her name, 1/2 as many as there are in the entire alphabet. We decided to find out how many letters we have in our names. We also found out who has the longest name in our class. Each child write the letters of their name in a strip of boxes, then counted carefully.
Finally, we sorted ourselves by the number of letter we have in our names. 5 was a very popular number, with 5 kids having 5 letters in their names.
We are blessed with many double-name babies in our class. We decided to count the letters in the names they go by, so we had many names with 9+ letters.
Guess who has the most letters in their name???
Today was a very good day at school. We accomplished all that we needed to, and then some. Each child took home homework. It is not my favorite thing for young children, but it is a reality of going to big school. The children are to assemble a homework kit (crayons, glue, scissors), and find a quiet homework place to do their work. Hopefully having some of these in place will help them when homework comes in the fall. We will talk more about this during our parent session at the end of June.
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