Stepping Stones Preschool

We are back at school and our first week was all about navigating our classroom. This week we are starting our family unit and today we talked about family trees. We talked about the people who are in our family tree and then made an apple tree to represent our family trees. We pointed to the different apples to describe who they were in our family. Grandparents, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers. We have lots to be thankful for in our families!

Today we hit another milestone. Our butterflies are ready to be out in the wild! The kids were sad about letting them go. We made Butterfly Books to add stickers and pictures to keep of the time we spent with our amazing winged friends.

We made bubble art today to go along with our Bible story about Jesus and the boat full of fish. Whenever we ask God for something it seems like he asks us to do something first. And then watch as he does something miraculous with our obedience. Jesus’ followers wanted to get fish so badly after getting skunked all night; and Jesus asked them to fish where they’d already tried without success. How amazing is it when we don’t argue and just obey?!

Huge milestone!!!! Decoding words starts by picking out sounds in letters they recognize. And then eventually hearing them in words. /p/ - /i/- /g/ helps them to hear each sound that is in the word and that’s what we want to focus on in the beginning. We use the red/blue paddle to switch every time we change the sound. So /p/ is red, /i/ is blue and then /g/ is red again. You can use your flat hand on the table to repeat the same idea; either way you want the kids to hear each sound. And when they do, their face lights up as they crack the code to reading!!!!

Way to go, little learner! I’m so proud of you!

Today we talked about swimming and why ducks are so good at it. We made a duck hat and had our babies follow us. Especially after reading our story today about a duck family, we learned that the babies have to follow their parents and learn from them ducky things like swimming, waddling in a line and quacking. We also got to play “duck, duck, goose!”

This week we learned about boats. We talked about what makes them float and what makes them sink. We did a test in our own little lake! We also read this book about sail boats which can harness the power of wind!

Just some lucky duckies!

Here is the book we read today:

https://youtu.be/FcZS4VgTu7U?feature=shared

We have a creative cloud work out on the shelves. There’s a booklet with different kinds of clouds and what their names are. The kids can pick a cloud formation and use the craft supplies to try to make their clouds.

The hundred board is such an exciting achievement in our preschool class. It takes such a long time to count to 100. Recognizing the numbers and putting them in order takes a lot of skill, too, because it requires the ability to recognize patterns as well as number recognition. And lots and lots of concentration! Nothing beats that look of satisfaction when they make it to 100!