Home School Preschool

Loooong before I was a teacher, my first job in the education field was as an instructional aide at a preschool. This preschool was amazing!!! Some people think that preschools just babysit. Nope. This preschool provided amazing education and the teachers there were even more amazing! Even years later, I had my two older kids go to that preschool because I knew they would be set for Kindergarten!

I recently became a stay home mom again and have been enjoying it. 

The other day while my two older boys were at school,I decided, Heck, why don't I just do preschool at home! So that's what I did. ;)

I decided we'd start with the all famous letter A. I'd say my little students did pretty good. And they are now able to identify the letter A. (LOL, ok, so maybe they already knew, and was able to name and identify the letter A, but I like to think I solidified their knowledge of the letter A.

I cut out the Letter A and we made little ants with their finger prints. They loved it!

This was the next day. We reviewed the letter A and they had to identify it.

And they did a great job!

Parts of a Plant

The first week that we came back from our Spring break, we started our PLANT unit!

So far it's been a lot of fun! My kiddos love learning about plants.

The first week we just learned about "Parts of  A Plant". 

Here is an anchor chart that I got from this website. 

This was a worksheet that I made for my kids. 

I actually found one very similar to this but I modified it so that my kids could

fill out the information. 

Here's a song about Parts of  Plant that I wrote. 

Who knew I had a knack for writing lyrics! :)

These are some books that we read through out the week. 

Loved this activity for my kiddos! 

Petals are made out of their hands (Trace it 4 times)

And roots are made out of their hands too! (traced 2 times)

Journey's Unit

A couple of weeks ago we started our "Journeys" unit.

So keep in mind that this is my first year in 1st Grade. Plus my school is implementing Common Core for the first time. So we are experimenting and doing new things.

Here are somethings that I did with my class.

I thought it was important for my kiddos to have a sense of where they are on a map...especially if we were going to be talking about Journeys. We started off with the book, "Me on the Map".

We read this story over the course of 2 days.

We drew and learned about maps. And they learned key vocabulary such as North, South, East, West, compass, map key, etc.

We did this for about week. After they got a pretty good idea of how to use a map, we went ahead and started to learn about the World Map. 

We started the 2nd week with learning about the World map. We learned the different continents. My kids LOVED learning the Continent Song. They got really good at singing it and identifying the different continents. This was probably one of my favorite units because I could see they were enjoying it so much!

About mid-week, we started learning the Oceans Song. They also LOVED this song!

 I also read "Captain Bill Pickney's Journey". I really like this story because it tracked Captain Pickney's journey and we were able to track it on our World Map.

I went to Target and found this gem! A World Map Puzzle!

I bought 5 of them for workshop stations! My kids had a lot of fun!

Then we did a ME ON THE MAP activity. On each tab the kids wrote about the word. 

I also made this worksheet for the kiddos. They had a lot of fun and felt so smart identifying and writing the names of the continents and oceans.

I wasn't very good about taking pictures about we did, so sorry if I didn't post everything up!

Over all, I think this was a successful unit!

The 4 Seasons in a Week

This week was Parent Conference week. That means minimum day all week! Yay!

So to wrap up our Weather unit, we ended with learning about the Seasons and the different weather that happens during each season. Each day I read a section from this book. It had beautiful pictures and gave very good visuals. 

Then I made an anchor chart for each season. And included the months, the different types of activities, clothes, and weather for each month. 

I got the Season anchor chart idea from this cute website. 

Each day my students wrote at least 3 sentences about the season we were talking about.

Monday--Read and wrote about Spring.

Tuesday--Read and wrote about Summer.

Wednesday--Read and wrote about Fall.

Thursday--Read and wrote about Winter.

Friday--Finished up any unfinished writing & art.

 These are the sentence frames that I used. 

Here are a few of my favorite sentences and drawings from my kiddos. 

(He's having a picnic)

So for Friday art, I painted each of their hands and did 4 hand prints on a big construction paper.

I like how different each of my students painted their hand trucks. 

And here was our final product. My kiddos had SO much fun doing art. 

This was mine. 

This scholar was late and I just ended up painting his tree trunk for him. 

Water Cycle Week

This week we learned about the water cycle. My students loved learning about it! They were excited to learn big words. We focused on syllables as we said the words. They were so proud of themselves when they learned how to pronounce it correctly.

 

 

 

 

They Especially loved this song. It goes along with, "She'll Be Coming Around The Mountain".

How's the Weather?

In my class we are learning about weather! I got so many great ideas from pinterest and will do my best to give credit to where it's due!

I read these books through out the few weeks that we were learning about weather.

On the first day we did a KWL of what my scholars know about weather. The next day we listed all of the weather words that they could think of. Then they each picked a weather word they wanted to write and draw for the class. We wrote and drew the words on raindrop cut outs. I got this really cute idea from over all Teaching In High Heels.

Weather words. 

Their rain drops hung up in the window. 

Close up. 

The next day I folded up pieces of paper and had my students write down 8 weather words along with a drawing. They had a really good time drawing and talking about weather words they chose. 

After a few days of discussing and getting comfortable with weather words we were ready to think about making sentences. Here I made an anchor chart with 3 kinds of weather. We discussed what we can do and what we can wear for each kind of weather. 

The next day they picked their favorite kind of weather and wrote at least 3 sentences about it. 

(I'll have to remember to take some pictures of their work because it turned out super cute!)

Here are some of their writings:

I found this SUPER cute poem about weather. I wrote it out and we read it all week. We also reviewed nouns and verbs using this poem. We under lined all the verbs with green and all of the nouns with red. 

I found this poem over at Mrs. Saylor's Log. She has a really cute hand out that goes along with the poem. 

I also printed this WILD WEATHER book out. My kiddos L-O-V-E-D it!

They had so much fun doing it! You can buy it if you'd like over at Teachers Pay Teachers.

After learning about weather, we moved onto clouds! Holy Moly, my kiddos L-O-V-E-D learning about clouds! This anchor chart took me 2 days to make. I started off with stratus clouds and cumulus clouds. The next day we finished it off with cirrus clouds and cumulonimbus clouds. On the third day my kiddos used this information to write about their favorite kind of cloud. On the forth day we edited their work and started on the final draft. 

I continued with clouds for another week. I wanted them to use more adjectives. After we listed adjectives for each cloud they wrote a sentence for each cloud.