Busy Bees Preschool

7/08/2012

Duck on a Bike

April 30, 2012 and May 2, 2012 we read the book Duck on a Bike. Duck had fun riding a bike on the farm. It wasn't very long before all the farm animals were riding bikes. The kids had fun playing with Fisher Price farm animals.

During Writer's Workshop, Emily helped the kids think of things to write about. Writer's Workshop is my favorite preschool activity. The kids are creative with their writing and drawings about the exciting things in their lives like getting a new bunk bed or proclaiming their love for ice cream. By the end of the school year the kids really seemed to learn how to write a short sentence.

We pretended to ride our bikes around the farm and look for turkeys that walk around in our neighborhood.

Emily and the kids had a contest to see who could write their name the most. The girls were very competitive and wrote their names several times. The boys wrote their names five times and called it good.

All the kids worked on their packet of farm activities. The kids were great with the dot-to-dot and maze pages. They had fun matching the baby animals to the mommy animals.

The kids decorated farm animals with sparkles, paint, glitter, and feathers. They were the cutest animals on the farm!

We had a great time making barns. Everyone was very unique in designing their barn. We glued on sticks and glitter. We also glued on some hay for the animals to eat. I think the kids had the most fun putting on all the animal stickers. We had some pretty crowded barns!

The Grouchy Ladybug

On February 15, 2012 and February 22, 2012 we had a great time reading the Grouchy Ladybug! We talked about what makes us grouchy. Here we are showing our grouchy faces:

We played a counting/memory game with ladybug spots. We all took home our own game.

Next we took a nature walk to see if we could find any ladybugs. We did not find any ladybugs, but we had fun running around outside!

After the nature walk we made ladybug clocks. The kids learned how to tell time with the hour and half hour. They were impressive!

Our phonics lesson for the week was J and K. Here the kids are Jumping for Joy with Jingle Bells. It was a fun and noisy lesson.

6/29/2012

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Oh, the Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss

After we read the "long" (according to the kids) book, we talked about different places. Where our families live, were we live, different countries, etc. We located a few of the states on a map and then colored our own map of the United States.

For our craft, we painted and decorated our graduation hats.

They did a great job on them.

Their graduation "walk". We had to do it for each of the moms, so they got to graduate about 7 times. We really wished Ryder could have been there, but glad he didn't come to spread the sick germs.

Congratulations Busy Bees! You are amazing. You will be awesome in Kindergarten.

5/22/2012

Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty with the Busy Bees was anything but something that you might snooze through. It was such a hoot! Since I had already shared with them The Nutcracker back in December, we reviewed a little about Tchaikovsky, orchestras and ballet. I taught them a few ballet steps-- releve, plie and jete. We discussed that boys can participate in ballets too! I told them about how strong males were in ballet. We found Russia again on the globe.

We also discussed who authors are and how Sleeping Beauty was written by the Brothers Grimm. We discussed how people have taken that story and written it themselves into different versions of the story. We looked at several different copies of this book from the library, noticing what was the same and different.

We also talked about what a character is and identified the ones in Sleeping Beauty. Then we headed off to the table to color and cut character puppets from the story. (This is shown in the first picture below, after the videos). Afterwards for math, we put numbers on the back of the puppets and discussed ordinals. This way the kiddos could take their puppets home and know which came first, second, third and fourth in retelling the story in a puppet show.

While the kids we were working at the table, they had the funniest conversation! It started with Noah and Sydney saying they wanted to be paleontologists when they grew up. At which point Syd chimed in that she was going to be a paleontologist AND a mom. Noah, not to be outdone, then announced that he was also going to be a dad of 90-20 kids! Calli pipes up that she is going to be a missionary. Paige says she is going to be a mom. Ryder says he wants to be a basketball player. Lincoln says he doesn't know. I say, fair enough. :)

On Wednesday, it was showtime! Below is our very own Sleeping Beauty production. Props were child-made-- the boys cut and glued together swords and the girls cut and glued together flowers.

Math (pictured above)... Aurora sleeps for 100 years in the story. We made 100 by each child counting out 10 bears and making a group of 10. (I did the extras to equal 100). Then we made 10 groups of 10 to show what 100 is. We wrote the number 10 on a post it note by each group.

Art (shown below)... Tchaikovsky painting.