Preschool: Cars and Street Signs

The preschool group has officially started.  There is Chelsie (will be 5 in Dec), Edmund (who just turned 4), Jenna (will turn 4 in Dec), and Robert (who's 3 1/2).  Of course, there is also Hannah when we are at my house.

We started preschool on the couch singing a little song about cars that www.notimeforflashcards.com had.

Little Red Car

http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/2008/01/little-red-car.html

Vroom! Vroom ! Went the little red car one day,
Vroom! Vroom! Went the little red car!
Vroom! Vroom! Went the little red car one day ,
and they all went Vroom! Vroom! Skreeeeeech!
But we all know cars go ,
beep beep beep beep beep,
beep beep beep beep beep,
beep beep beep beep beep

We all know cars go ,
beep beep beep beep beep
They don’t go , Vroom! Vroom! Skreeeeeech!

Robert and Jenna loved it. I think Edmund liked it and Chelsie just wanted to hold Hannah.

Then we read "My Car" by Byron Barton.  This books has really easy words and sentences. Hailey was able to read it with very little help just the other day. It also has colorful, simple pictures which got the message to the kids right away.

Before, I lost their attention completely, we moved to the floor and played "Crazy Cars" created by www.kellyskindergarten.com It is just little cards with Lighting McQueen on them and a letter of the alphabet, either upper- or lower- case.  The goal say what the letter is and collect as many cars as you can.  Robert knew all the letters while Chelsie and Jenna really struggled.  Edmund knew most of the letters. There were also "key" cards where you got to take another person's car and there were "flag" cards that ended the game.  It was a good game to let me know how familiar the kids are with their letters.

 Then the kids were pretty much ready to be done with school, so I pulled out the car road map I got from familyfun.go.com (Disney magazine) and pulled out our big bucket of cars.  This was a big hit.

 I also had this track that when to a little people airport set.

 When the kids started getting a little possessive (mainly Robert), I took them outside and pointed out our street signs since we live on the corner.  We talked about how it was green.  So, we can inside and put felt letters on green paper so everyone can have a street named after them.

 Edmund was the first one I worked with. He told me that his name started with an E but that he didn't know the rest. So I pulled all the letters out for him (I really meant to do that before the kids got here anyhow), and while my attention was turned to the other kids, he did his name sign all by himself.

 Jenna was very cute and wanted to add a lot of different letters to her name like X.  So she needed a lot of help but was entertaining to work with.

 Poor Chelsie has a hard time with her name because the "ch" is very tricky to understand.  However, she had great fine motor skills and could take the white backing off the letters. She even helped Robert out too.

Then there's Robert, who knows how to spell his name and could put all his letters down in the right order, going the correct way but just couldn't get the backing off.  He wanted a picture too and decided to pose like that.

So that ended our activities at preschool and they spent the last 5-10 minutes playing outside.  While there were outside they saw a stop sign and pointed it out. I wanted to do a little more of the different street signs but the few a had, I forgot to cut out and had a hard time finding the basic signs to print out.  Also, I wanted to do Green Light/Red Light but again I just didn't get it ready and the kids were just done.  I'm so excited to work with these kids and seeing their neat personalities shine.  I've already observed how Chelsie loves to play mommy and just wanted to hold Hannah and carry her everywhere.  Surprisingly, Hannah didn't mind too much.  It really shocked me (in a good way) to see a little girl being so loving to a younger kid. While Robert on the other hand just runs them over.

Preschool will be every Monday and Wednesday for an hour.  Next week is Edmund's mom's turn and she is doing trains.  I'm really excited for this group.