Week 2!

To be honest, I had a great but challenging time this week.  I had it easy on Monday- with only 6 Busy Bees.  It was great to put all the preparation into action and be "teacher" again.  I really enjoy your kiddos.  Monday's are always easier as the kids are in a new place with new things and a new teacher.  Wednesday they are used to you, the new place and new things and are a little bit more challenging.  That is a brief synopsis of "how it went."  Here are some details (but not in order on the daily schedule):

I really enjoyed reading and preparing things for The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  The kids loved the book too.  We re-told the story on a felt board and each Busy Bee had a chance to put up pieces as we read it.  They loved it.

 

What Trevor does after everyone signs in.  I will make a plug now:  whoever would just loooove to take my son off my hands during pre-school, I will be your best friend forever.

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Ryder was creative during outside play and rallied a few to do a puppet show behind the slide.

 

Emily (Ryder's big sister) was a HUGE help to me this week!  (Thank you!)  The kids absolutely loved her.  Here Sydney and Bronwen take turns at tracing her with chalk.  They needed her to lift her head when tracing. :)

 

Insisting on all sitting at the same dinky table during snack!

 

This is a math lesson we all did together.  We used dot-dot paints to put as many dots on the caterpillar as the number said.  

 

Center time!  I think this is the kids favorite part of the day.  Noah was really into the little science center- figuring out what stuck to magnets and looking up close with a magnifying glass.

  

Checking out Emily's eye.....

 

Sorting bears into cups

 

Magnet letters.  Ryder has a charming smile!

 

 

Craft time!- We painted egg carton caterpillars on Monday and butterflies on Wednesday.  Paint is ALWAYS a hit.

 

Calli mixes her paint to make new colors.  Impressive butterfly!

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And lastly, book look.  These 4 boys get along great with each other.

 

All in all, a great week!

Week 1 Over and Done - Way to go Michal!

I had to post these pictures, mainly so you could see their funny personalities.  I was literally laughing out loud (I'm not going to type lol, because it's always thrown out there so casually :) ) Check out Bronwen - she's got her hands behind her head and just chilling out. Not a care in the world for that little miss.  Evan was digging for some treasures in a few of them.  But Paige, oh my, that girl wins.  Look at her expressions.  So funny.  I love it. 

Michal reading to our Busy Bees.  

Michal, what a wonderful job you did to start us off! Noah's been talking about it all week.

I was going to mention that you ladies can post whenever you want.  You don't have to wait until your week to do a post.  Also, I like to take pictures of my kid's artwork, and then when a few months has passed and they end up in the garbage somehow, I have record of them.  I made a tab up at the top for you to download your child's artwork, so that way it will be on here for when I make a book at the end of the year.  For those of you who aren't bloggers, or who save the artwork forever like a good mom should, you can just ignore me.  

Adding pictures to the tab pages is just like adding a new post.  Click on new post, then go to edit pages, find the arts and crafts page and click edit*.  Add your pictures**, click on the pictures and when the table appears click on small (there will be LOTS of art as we get going, so we'd better keep them small images), then click publish.  Need help, let me know or you can email them to me and I can add them.  

*The tab pages are one page documents that you can continue to add to, but it's not a new post each time, so just be careful not to delete someone else's pictures when you're in the page adding your images.  If you do, we won't tare and feather you.  I promise. 

**Make sure your child's name is on there somewhere, so we know who the masterpiece belongs to. 

First Day at Busy Bees!

Today was the much anticipated first day of Busy Bees Pre-K. I know that all the kids were excited to start off the year. I'll admit I was apprehensive about how the first day would go. Luckily, April volunteered to borrow Margaret so that I could just focus on corralling our 8 little Bees. I am writing longer than usual so that you moms can have a feel for what to expect when your turn comes, especially if it is soon.

Everyone started off with writing their names. I remembered after two or three had done it that I had intended for the first week to give them each a piece of paper with an enormous font that they could just copy. Oh well, next time.

Writer's Workshop went better than I had expected for the first day, although we did run over time by almost 10 minutes. I quickly discovered that this will be the time when our kids spill our secrets to the other moms. While some of the kids reported things like "I read books with my daddy" or "I played with blocks", we did hear that Noah's mom hates the Cat in the Hat movie and that Ethan punched Sidney in the face and bloodied her nose this morning! It made for some great variety in the stories told during Writers' Workshop!:)

I chose to do the transition between free play and Writer's Workshop because that is when they needed it. We did music after, however. The kids loved learning Show Me How You Do the Monkey and The Pony Song, although it still needs some work:).

We skipped calendar because we were behind on time and jumped right into our book, How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. The kids did great listening and most of them raised their hand when they wanted to speak after watching Ryder do so like a pro! He was fantastic! We listed the ingredients for making apple pie, then went out to the dining room table and mixed in the sugar, flour, cinnamon, and salt with the already prepared apples. Then each kiddo got a piece of pie crust and shaped their own apple pocket pie. I think their favorite part was rubbing flour all over the table and generally making a big mess:)

Outside time! I scrambled to clean up our mess, make sure the pies were sealed and get them in the oven, and pop some popcorn. The kids had a great time playing, although the girls thought they might need to report any infractions of the "be nice" rule every five seconds. I stepped outside and reminded them that Busy Bees are always nice and respectful, but mostly let them handle their grievances. We gathered around the outside table for apple pie (frozen, store bought so as to not tempt me) and popcorn. Everyone was very polite and about half of them actually ate the pie! Sydney and Paige LOVED it.

Back inside, we counted our apples that the kids had brought and sorted them by color and size. We cut them in half and talked about the concept that two halves make a whole. Several of them were concerned because they wanted to eat their apples, so I passed everyone half their apple to munch on while we got ready to do our apple stamping with the other halves. We used red, green, and yellow, since those are the colors of apples. I thought they turned out really cute and wish that I had taken a picture of everyone's. Here is Bronwen's.

Now, on to centers. I had them all sit down on the rug while I explained what centers are and how they work. Then we took a couple of minutes to see how to do each center. That left time for them to do two 5 minute centers, which turned out to be perfect.

Lastly, we did Phonics with Andy the Anteater. Ask your kids about what Andy has an appetite for or an allergy to. They did great!

Of course, we did Book Look at the end. For some of them, that is their favorite time, and they were very worried that we weren't going to have Book Look.

All in all, a great day! We may have to tweak the timing of some things, but let's give it a few weeks and see how things develop. I was proud of our Busy Bees.

Schools In Session

Trying to "get to know you", even when most of the kids didn't want to "get to know" anyone. :)

I hope you will enjoy this blog, and use it as a resource to learn from each others creativity and ideas.  I hope Michal doesn't mind that I use her lesson plan as an example of some ways to post about your preschool week.   

Example #1:  Post a couple of pictures of things you did that day/week and state what they are doing in the pictures.  Picture of the kids making apple pies, with caption "today we made apple pies". Easy, right?

Example #2:  Use this as your place to actually write down your lesson plan (like Michal did for us at the meeting).  You can just refer back to the blog for your notes.  You can always type it up, and have the post publish for the actual day, so if you plan it on Sunday you can have the post publish on Monday.  Don't know how to do this, I can show you if you want to.

Example #3:  Bullet style

Today we:

* Make a list of ingredients in an apple pie

* We all got to make our own apple pies

* We ate our pies!

*We used apples to learn about sorting.

* Then we used our apples as stamps to make an art page.

That's it!  You can add a picture if you want after the list.  

Example #4:  Whatever else you want to put on here.

This blog is for everyone to use, and is a NO JUDGEMENT zone.  You can say or post as little or as much as you want.  Don't feel obligated to do a lengthy post if you don't want to - if you want to, by all means do it.   Have fun, and if you need help with anything let me know.