Welcome back! I hope you and your family had a great holiday! After talking about what they did over the break, we jumped right into our new theme which is Out of this World. We talked about the Solar System, the 8 planets, and why Earth is the only planet that has living things. I did mention to the children that Pluto is not a planet but it’s now called a Dwarf Planet. I talked about each planet and how they are different from each other and how some planets are similar.
They did a Hidden Stars project where they had to use yellow paint or chalk to make stars in the sky. We did a Pastel Aurora where they used pastels to draw on black construction paper. I had them pretend they were a scientist who discovered a new planet and I had them draw a picture of the planet. They had to dictate what the name of the planet is and a few things about that planet which I wrote down.
We practiced writing Pp, Planet letter matching where they matched lowercase letters to uppercase letters, practiced writing names of planets, put letters in alphabetical order, and they put the magnetic planets in order while using “The Sun is Kind of a Big Deal” as a reference. They worked in pairs and talked to each other while putting the planets in order. They practiced writing the sentence, “I have three pizzas” using sight words and one of the words that I wrote on the board that starts with the letter Pp.
They practiced writing 15 and the word fifteen, they put the numbers on rocket ships in order from 0-30, they did a Solar System count and clip where they had to count the number of objects and use the clothes pin to clip on the number, and they matched the number word names to the numbers. Some of the children used blocks to stack and count (they were trying to pretend they were building a rocket ship) while using 1:1 correspondence.
I brought out a mat with the planets on it and toys in the shape of planets for the children to match. They also did a Solar System puzzle that was huge and they were able to put together. It was a fun, but busy week.
This week, I had a talk with the children about keeping our hands to ourselves because we can accidently hurt a friend and I’m trying to teach them how to use gentle hands because children at this age tend to get a little bit rough. They do not realize their strength and I know they do not mean to hurt a friend.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me.