Peek @ the Week

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had much time to post the last two weeks... here's a quick peek at what we've been up to this week!

We've been reading books about food, fall and family in preparation for Thanksgiving! Here's our bookshelf this week:

We've focused heavily on the books "Feast for 10" by Cathryn Falwell and "Today is Monday" by Eric Carle.

We're working on a take home book based on "Feast for 10" .... here's our artwork so far - 2 pumpkins, 3 chickens, 6 bunches of greens and 7 pickles... 

Our sensory bin the week has a variety of beans, play food, pots, pans, funnels, spoons etc.

Here's one of our morning work activities - bean sorting.

I introduced some light play using an overhead projector with a handful of translucent plastic leaves, leaf shaped sequins (table scatter decor from the craft store) and plastic letter tiles.

And we learned about letter 'L' for leaves since the leaves are still turning colors and falling - Here's our Rainbow writing letter 'L' with smashed up leaves sprinkled over glue. Simple but fun!

That's all for now... what are you up to this week?

{5 Fun Magazine Letter Ideas}

I must admit that I've got a serious thing for cutting up old magazines... It's nothing new. For me, there's just something mind-numbingly wonderful about cutting up paper. My love for paper has followed me from childhood to adulthood and now into my classroom - here are some of my favorite ways to use magazine letters with my students!

1. Letter ID Activities - Magazine letters are great for building letter recognition skills because there are so many different font colors, sizes & styles. At this level, I have students 'search, cut & paste' a single target letter using my printable magazine letters and alphabet worksheets. I also use this FREEBIE Letter Hunt worksheet for finding & matching all letters of the alphabet.

2. Upper & Lowercase Matching - Once students begin recognizing and learning letter names, I like to take advantage of the varied font styles for upper and lowercase matching practice. This is especially important for letters like 'Aa' - we teach students to write a lowercase 'a' one way, and we expect them to be able to recognize a letter 'a' in another way. These letter dominoes are one of my favorite ways to work on upper & lowercase matching; they also lend themselves for uppercase matching and 'traditional' dominoes type play for upper and lowercase matching with more capable students.

3. Sorting - There are so many ways to sort letters. With my very young students, we start by sorting letters by color, size, and shape. Then I provide two well known letters to sort and increase difficulty from there. We use different sorting strategies and visual organizers - I LOVE when my students come up with new sorting rules and ways of organizing their letters! 

4. Name Practice - What little kid doesn't love making something wonderful with their name? Last year, we made name plates for cubbies with my printable magazine letters. I printed each child's name on a sentence strip, provided pages of my printable magazine letters and glue to construct 'ransom note' inspired name tags; we laminated the names used them for cubby tags.

5. Sight Word & Spelling Word Practice - With older students, magazine letters are a fun hands-on way to practice spelling. It's much more than just writing the words out, students must find, cut, arrange and glue letters for this task. Great as a literacy center, morning work activities or for daily word work!

For most of the above activites, I've used a combination of printable magazine letter cutouts from my TpT or TN stores and real letter cutouts.

What other ways do you enjoy using magazine letters in your classroom? More ideas coming soon!

A Peek at our Week...

We've been working on an All About Me/Feelings sort of theme. The kids have really been in to books lately, so we've been taking advantage of their attention for books and have been experimenting with some fun and wacky stories that I haven't ever used for this unit. I've been focusing on feelings pretty hard, because I have several students who really need to learn how to express their feelings through more words rather than through behaviors - usually challenging behaviors.

"I Aint Gonna Paint No More" By Karen Beaumont has been a real hit! The kids love the illustrations the rhyming sing-song story. I love seeing their faces when we get to the last part... "I'm such a nut, gonna paint my....." Only a few of the kids really get the rhyming aspect of the story and fill in the appropriate word -- BUTT!

 While we read, I usually give the kids dry paint brushes and have them pretend to paint their body parts while we read. This year, we followed up with making body tracings and coloring them in with crayons - our paper wasn't thick enough to withstand prek painting while taped on the wall; I'm sure the administration would have killed me if I let them paint their body pictures while taped up on the freshly repainted wall!

 I love the kid's rendition of their eyes, nose, mouth and ears!

We've also been reading the heck out of our "Pete the Cat" books lately! I took a chance and ordered the Pete the Cat paperback and audio CD bundle.

I've been working or setting up a listening center for my students, but audiobooks can be very tough for kids with hearing loss to listen to - often there's just too much background noise and/or sound effects for the kids to hear the reading over. These CDs are pretty good, with a nice reading pace, good use of music and sound effects for the most part and the kids have really enjoyed listening to them! They especially love that Pete sings fun jazzy songs!

Turns out that you can download the mp3 tracks right from Harper Collins' Pete the Cat page! They seem to be identical to the CD's that I got with my books from Scholastic.

This is really a great book to talk about feelings with - Pete doesn't get mad, or worried, he just keeps on walking and singing - because it's all good!! Fun lesson for the kids. We've talked about how Pete the Cat would deal with friends taking toys, pushing, yelling etc.

I also introduced a new sensory bin for the next couple of weeks. I have several kids who get occupational therapy this year and need to work on a wide range of fine motor skills. I've been wanting to make kool-aid colored noodles for a while, so I had a perfect opportunity as I couldn't come up with a great "all about me" or "feelings" themed sensory bin. I thought about doing a photo tutorial of how to dye the noodles, but my kitchen was a disaster and I just couldn't bring my self to clean it up or show it off. So check out the great photo tutorial over at MamaMiss if you want to know how to do it!  Here's our colored noodle bin:

Here are the kids going to town - they played for a good 30 minutes and I think that they might have stayed another 30 if I would have let them. There were tons of opportunities for fine motor practice including stringing noodles & buttons on pipecleaners and/or string, pouring, dumping, using the tongs to move noodles, putting them in containers with different size openings, scooping and stirring with the spoon etc.

Here's last week's Shredded Paper Sensory Bin -- it was SO simple, but also entertaining! However, it was incredibly difficult to clean up off of our carpeted area!

And last, we also stickered letter M for Me!  Also a great fine motor activity. 

There's a Peek at our Week! What are you up to in your classroom this week? Please leave comments or links to your blog - I'd love to see what you're up to!

BUSY is an understatement!

It's been so long since I posted anything - not to say that I haven't been doing anything. It's really the complete opposite; I've been so busy that I simply cannot think straight enough to post something.

Preschool is back in full swing and the 2013-2014 school year is off to a running sprinting start! I'm back teaching at the University this fall and that too is going at an insane pace; I have 27 students in my class, which is a few less than last semester, so I'm thankful for having a few less papers to grade. Business in my TeachersPayTeachers store has been amazing, but that means it sucks up any spare second that I have to keep things moving forward.

We've been having a blast in preschool so far this year. My students just finished up a unit about apples and letter A - they really LOVED learning about and, of course, eating apples! Here are a few pictures from our apple unit.

Apple Printing - we made these nifty little handles out of our apples which let us actually eat more of the apples than the way I used to do it! The kids really thought the 'handle' was great! 

Letter A Tape & Sticker projects - great fine motor practice for early letter learners! Just tape the letter on a surface using painters taper or colored masking tape. Provide tiny stickers for placing along the lines of the letter. When students are finished, tape over top of their work with packing tape, peel entire letter off and place on a piece of colored paper to display. Great artifact for portfolio! I usually put the letter on our table, but students love doing this work on other surfaces like the windows, doors or walls.

Painters Tape & Sticker Letter Practice

Letter A hunt... huddle up and GO! Color, cut and tape these great bracelets around little wrists for instant interest in letters! I've had students pointing out letter A in the environment for days without any additional prompting.

Alphabet Bracelets can be found in my TpT store!

We also enjoyed using some of the games and worksheets form my Apple Roll, Count & Graph early literacy and math pack.

Now back to the hustle and bustle - off to pick up my own toddler, finish dinner, walk the dog, do the laundry and of course grade papers and come up with a master plan for tomorrow's activities! A teacher's work is never done...

Printable Magazine Letters...

There's something that I absolutely love about cutting up old magazines... or perhaps just cutting paper of any type. I find it relaxing,  even meditative in some ways. As a child, I had a thing for cutting paper... making a mess, using the entire roll of tape for one project etc. In high school, I had a shoebox full of colorful images that I had carefully snipped out of the pages of my Teen Beat and Bop magazines that I used to make colorful collages. One day, my mother inadvertently threw them all away one day while I was at school!! I was furious!  I continued collecting magazine snippets throughout college, and had an entire wall of my dorm room practically wallpapered with my favorite images. Even in adulthood, I still find cutting up old magazines strangely relaxing, mind-numbingly different from the rush of my normal life...

In my classroom, Letter Learning Activities are one of my favorite things to do with old magazines! There's something about the random letters from magazines that makes me smile - its whimsy, wonderful... color, crazy, fun! The mess that went along with bringing magazine activities into my classroom made me cringe and we couldn't always find the letters we wanted with the magazines we had available at the time. I literally had boxes of letters, pictures, words and other paper bits at home - so I was inspired to create my popular printable magazine letters! Here are some of my fun letter sets for printing, cutting and pasting:

You can find ALL the sets HERE

Here's a recent alphabet hunt my students worked on:

Download the Magazine Letter Alphabet Hunt template FREEBIE here.  I'm constantly coming up with new ideas for my letters! I'd love to hear your ideas...


p.s. here's a FREEBIE black and white magazine letter sheet - perfect for making photocopies!