Acorns

So today the focus was on hide and hid. I have a paper squirrel and some acorns. I gave the squirrel and an acorn to a kiddo. Their job was to hide the acorn somewhere in the room (we did watch, that way we could answer the question).

Then I asked another kiddo "Where did Yousef  hide the squirrel?"

"Yousef hid the squirrel _________." Then it was their turn to hide a squirrel.
The past tense version needed lots of modeling.  The kiddos kept saying "hide" instead of "hid."

I must admit this lesson was hilarious!! The kids were laughing and having a wonderful time, way more than I thought they would!! My favorite was when E'Mani put the acorn in the oven, closed the door and turned the knobs to turn the oven on. Then Andrew went over turned the "oven off" and opened the door. "oh, its hot!" he said. What great spontaneous language!!

**Sorry no pictures from the lessons.

For math that day, we "gathered" nuts. I spread out the acorns and called one kiddo to "gather" acorns. I counted to 5 and let each kiddo gather as many acorns as they could. We counted the acorns and made a chart to see who gathered the most.

Fall is here!

I must say this school year is going to be busy! I am out of my room co-teaching for half the day. Then rush back to eat lunch and hit the ground running again! I promise to try and be better about posting, it might not be everyday this year. 

Well fall has finally hit this year in Michigan. It is my favorite time of year. I love the smell of the cool air, the crunch of the leaves under foot, apples, pumpkins, donuts and cider! So this past week I introduced the fall unit to my preschoolers. 

The vocabulary words for this unit are: Fall, tree trunk, branch, rake, raking, leaves, scarecrow, squirrel, acorn, apples, leaf pile, pumpkin, basket, red, orange, yellow and brown. 

The language targets for the unit are: -ing verbs (change, turn, rake, fall, gather), pronouns (he/she, his/her), past tense verbs (find/found, hide/hid) and prepositions (on, under, next to, in front, behind, in). 

To kick off the fall unit we took a fall nature walk. I gave each kiddo a clip board and a nature checklist. I found it on pinterest. Here is the link to the prekinders website where I found the checklist. I changed the ant to a tree trunk as that was one of our vocabulary words. The kiddos had so much fun running around and coloring their checklist. When we finished the checklist, we of course collected leaves to be sorted when we got inside. 

For Math we sorted the leaves. We started with size; small, medium and big. Then moved onto colors. We counted and made tallies. 

For centers I had out coffee filters to make trees. The kiddos colored with washable markers then sprayed with water. What fun! After the trees dried, I glued the trunk on. 

For the afternoon center the kiddos painted the back of leaves and stamped with the leaves. I found this on pinterest. I don't have the link sorry. But here are the pictures from my classroom.