It’s hard to believe that December is here!  Our class has been hard at work for the past two weeks.  Math workshop has proven that these students are graphing machines.  We have played many graphing games both as a group and independently.  The children really enjoyed our color roll and graph activity.  Each student had a die with colored dots and a graph.  They rolled their dice and continued to graph until one color reached the top.  They also loved our Fruit Loops graphing game.  Everyone received a cup of fruit loops and had to graph the colors before they could eat them for a special snack.  Then, they had to decide which color they had the most of, and which color they had the least of.  This led us into ordering – students have ordered items by size, by length, and by weight.  They are able to easily put items in order from the smallest to largest, shortest to tallest, etc.  We are now beginning to work on numeration.  We are identifying numbers, writing numbers, and connect numerals to quantities.  At home, you can give your child measuring cups or spoons to put in order.  They can order food cans and boxes, too!  If you have paint strip samples, you can cut them apart and put the squares in order from lightest to darkest.

Writing workshop has been filled with many exciting sound and letter games.  We talked about different letters and built them with wooden pieces (big lines, little lines, big curves, little curves).  We then traced the letters we built with our fingers.  We use magnetic letters and a house with three windows to blend sounds together.  The children would pick a letter to put in the first window.  The second and third windows had the letters “a” and “t”.  Then they would squish all the sounds together and make a new word!   The class favorite was our shaving cream letter day.  We covered our tables in shaving cream and took turns picking letters to make.  As I modeled the proper formation, the children made the same letter in their shaving cream.  We had so much fun, we even threw in some numbers!  We will continue to work on sounds and formations to help our journaling.

The children have truly enjoyed their Library time.  Please continue to bring your library book on Friday so that you may check out a new one.  This past week, we also had a special invitation to the first grade class!  Our class loved working and interacting with the older students.  We did an excellent job while visiting their room and are eager to have another invitation!

December is our time for Holiday Traditions and Stories.  While I do not have a Pre-K sign-up sheet outside of our classroom, anyone is more than welcome to come in and do an activity or read a story.  Many parents have signed up for the morning classes, but if you are interested in coming into our Pre-K class as well, please let me know.