The Little Mouse, The Red-Ripe Strawberry & The Big Hungry Bear

One of my favorite books for working on concepts and descriptive words is "The Little Mouse, The Red-Ripe Strawberry & The Big Hungry Bear."  

The Little Mouse, The Red-Ripe Strawberry & The Big Hungry Bear

For Large Group next week we will be reading this book and then acting it out with our very own felt strawberries:

Felt Strawberries

Everyone will get a strawberry and we will use this to act out the story as we read it the second time: 

First we will try to hide our strawberries, then we will disguise them just like in the book:

The future's so bright, even strawberries have to wear shades….

Last we will use our hands to cut our strawberries in half and then share one half with our neighbor:

Strawberry halves

Here is our learning card:

Because we will be focusing on descriptive terms, our weekly handout is on teaching adjectives or descriptive words.  It is from Speech and Language Kids.  

Monster Trucks!

For the next two weeks we will be talking all about Monster Trucks during Large Group!  I will be in meetings on Wednesday and since we don't have preschool Thursday I will be in Miss Jeana's class on Monday and Miss Ange's classroom on Tuesday.  Then the following week I will swap (Monday, Miss Ange's and Tuesday, Miss Jeana's) since there will be Valentine festivities going on the last 2 days of that week!  Anyway, In High Scope, the curriculum our preschool uses, they really encourage lesson planning around children's interests.  Well, we have a little guy who absolutely loves everything Monster Trucks, so I was excited to plan some activities around this.  Here is our learning card:

We will talk about some fun facts related to monster trucks.  To help the children understand how loud monster trucks are, we will listen to a little of this clip from youtube.  After talking about the fun facts, we will all figure out if monster trucks are big or little, tall or short, heavy or light, and loud or soft.    

Each student will pretend to be a monster truck, name and all, as they go through our obstacle course: 

We will talk a lot about our obstacle course, with picture cues to help the children see where they will go.  Our VERY mini monster truck is in each picture to show us where to go: under the triangle table, behind the circle table, through the tunnel, over the bridge, and on the road.  

Each monster truck will be announced and when our stoplight turns green they can start their engines and take off through our obstacle course:

Our traffic signs will help each monster truck go in the right direction.  These signs will also be a great way for the students to work on environmental print:

It should be a fun, crazy day!  Because we will be working on several basic concept terms during this large group, our weekly handout is a wonderful post from SpeechGal Therapies, of course on basic concepts!  

Ocean Animals

One of our little guys LOVES ocean animals, so I decided to have a Large Group focused on this!  Here is our learning card:

We will focus on labeling actions and animals.  In addition, we will be playing a fun, fishing match game with these adorable visuals from Wild About Teaching!  While fishing we will be working on labeling the animals, but we will also be focusing on the concept terms, 'same' and 'different!'  Because of this, our weekly handout is one from Super Duper and focuses on teaching basic concepts.  

"I Can Day" at Preschool

During our first week of preschool, we will focus on answering What-Questions, naming and imitating action terms, and the initial "k" sound while saying, "I Can!" during  Large Group.  In addition, we will be talking about the concepts small, medium, and large.  Because of that our weekly hand out is a great Super Duper Handout that talks about what basic concepts are, lists of few of them, and gives some ideas for how to work on them with your own children.  Also, here is our Learning Card for the week: