Can you guess our letter of the week? Today we started day one of a week's worth of activities dedicated to the letter B.
This is the blue goo that I bought from the dollar bin at the dollar store. It's actually a bathtub product, but we put it in the sensory table and explored it that way. It is really cool to play with, but I can't imagine sitting in it in a bathtub! We described its physical attributes, poured it into containers, used basic pre-writing strokes in it, and just got used to the squishy, wet texture. Most of the kids loved it, but I have one hesitant little one who will hopefully make her way over to explore it by the end of the week :) I don't make kids touch stuff that grosses them out, but usually if the rest of us have enough fun with it the hesitancy will wear off soon enough.
For dramatic play, we are pretending to have a birthday party for a baby. The kids were so excited about this! I must have heard the birthday song 200 times today:) Some students played birthday party the whole time, while others were more interested in counting the birthday candles. I had one student who was mostly fascinated with identifying the letters in the Happy Birthday banner. Works for me! We snuck some math in there by giving them playdough, muffin tins and candles. After they decorated the playdough cupcake with a certain number of candles, they counted them. For my kids who were ready, we worked on matching the numeral candles to the number of stick candles. We discussed sizes of boxes and gift bags, identified shapes of birthday objects, and decided which gift objects would fit into each gift container. One-to-one correspondence could certainly be addressed by putting a bow on each box or an item in each gift bag.
Items in the birthday prop box include tablecloths, cups, plates, playdough, spoons, an empty icecream container, icecream scoop, stick candles and numeral candles, curling ribbons and bows, assorted gift bags and nesting gift boxes, a jar of sprinkles that I hot-glued and taped shut after removing 1/3 of the sprinkles, invitations/ envelopes, pens and stickers, and some small toys (balls, cars, books) for "wrapping".
Items in the birthday prop box include tablecloths, cups, plates, playdough, spoons, an empty icecream container, icecream scoop, stick candles and numeral candles, curling ribbons and bows, assorted gift bags and nesting gift boxes, a jar of sprinkles that I hot-glued and taped shut after removing 1/3 of the sprinkles, invitations/ envelopes, pens and stickers, and some small toys (balls, cars, books) for "wrapping".
For incorporated movement, we are bopping balloons with our body parts and blowing bubbles. Since I am not showing any pictures of my students, I don't have any pictures of that :)
For literacy exposure, these are the books on the bookshelf this week. These books are available for the kids to sit and read or for them to request an adult to read to them during free-choice time. The one with the camera flash obscuring the cover is called "Buzzzzzzzzz Said the Bee". I always try to make different types of reading materials available, such as board books, interactive books with velcro components, books with communication boards for my non-verbal students, magazines, catalogs, and adapted books, like the ones shown below:
We are reading "Brown Bear, Brown Bear," "Don't Worry Bear," and "Not a Box" out loud, in addition to the adapted books pictured above.