A simple recipe for amazing preschool success with your little ones

What does it take to make an outstanding recipe - whether the traditional kind for food, or a recipe for something much less tangible, like success?

I would argue that all recipes need ingredients, and better ingredients will usually yield better results. Of course, there has to be a method for putting those ingredients together, and surely almost every recipe needs to be carefully seasoned. 

 

My ingredients for preschool - beside the obvious preschoolers and adult carer - would have to start with books and music!  So it was this last week, when we focused on learning the letter J.

One of the wonderful things about children is their energy, and rather than fight it, I figured we'd expend some of it by dancing and singing. We exercised to 100 with Jack Hartman's Count to 100, and did the Tooty Ta with Dr. Jean - because no kid can resist sticking out their tongue and bottom while they dance (who can)?! We sang Hello My Name Is Joe, adding actions until we could barely stand, and worked on vocal modulation sang loudly and quietly with John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt while jingling our bells. Were the kids worn out? NO! Were the teachers? Yes, yes we were, but it was only 9:30 am so we kept going.

Do you see the huge pile of jewelry in the box shown above? We put it ALL on and JUMPED JOYFULLY in jewelry.  By the time we were done the kiddos were ready to sit down for a few books (and my exercise ring was closed for the day)! 

Jump Frog, Jump is a great book for an energetic group - the pages alternate between story line and exclaiming "Jump Frog, Jump!" We held our bodies still on the story pages, just waiting to explode our arms up into the air as we shouted at the frog to JUMP! (Little ones can't still for very long, but by alternating still and moving we're working on self control.)

After our stories were done we worked our fine motor muscles gluing jewels onto a letter j.  I had fine plans for making a jack-o-lantern uppercase J another day, but... some days you follow the recipe, and other days you improvise. It's all good!

This week we'll be focusing on letter K.  My music playlist includes Katalina Matalina, Old King Cole, Kookaburra, and Polly Put the Kettle On.  We'll be reading about kangaroos and koalas, making a letter K craft with a kangaroo and song, and crafting adorable koala headbands.

K is also for kittens, kisses and Kente Cloth, and we'll read about them all. We'll reach into my letter K box to find a king, keys, koala, KitKat and chocolate kisses. I have a karate outfit that the kiddos will take turns wearing, and we'll look for chocolate kisses hidden in the toy kitchen. In case that isn't enough, I'm super excited to have downloaded all the alphabet songs from HeidiSongs, so we'll be singing and dancing lots of letters!

If we go back to the recipe metaphor, I'll finish by adding a helping dollop of outside time and free play, and seasoning liberally with joy and love.  I'm pretty sure our recipe is going to be amazing!

How the "Champion of the World" Conquered Sight Words

 Are you a big sports fan?  How about your students? Whether it's football, baseball, basketball, skating, soccer, tennis or something else, chances are someone in your classroom LOVES sports!

I'm tutoring a first grader who is BIG into sports, and realized the key to keeping him engaged in sight word practice is right there: baseball, football, soccer and basketball.  I did what teachers have always done - went looking for just the right resource to help him master his sight words.  I didn't FIND it, so I MADE it:

Each sight word card includes an image of a child involved in a sport, from karate and canoeing to gymnastics and lacrosse, there are LOTS of choices. I made cards for letters, pre-primer, primer, first, second AND third grade words - who knows how far we might go with this fun theme?! - and made it a game because if it feels playful we're more engaged and for longer. 

 

To play: He gets a chance to read each word, if he gets it right he puts it through the goal and scores a point. If he misses a word I get to keep it - unless he gets an extra point card and uses it to "steal" my words by reading them. I don't get to read anything unless he misses, so I end up with very few word cards in my hand. Clearly the game is rigged in his favor, and there's an incentive to focus on any words that are missed because he might still get another chance to get them from me. There is nothing more satisfying to a kid than winning a game against an adult!

 

My student loved the soccer goal, and he loved the basketball goal, and we have practiced sight words, scoring goals for each word he reads.  He informed me one day that he was "The Champion of the World" at our game. (Score a big win for me- he WANTS to practice reading with this game AND he's mastering new sight words!)

Then he asked about a football goal. And a baseball field - with just baseball player cards - please? I guess you know what happened next:

Now I'm trying to think of a way to incorporate making and using a paper football (here's a video I found that shows how to make one, and another video with the rules) as a reward for doing well with this sight word game.  If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them!

Reading sight words is wonderful of course, but we need to read and understand them in sentences, paragraphs and whole stories, not just in isolation.   More sports themed learning to the rescue!

Each of the 18 sentences and matching pictures in this set is heavily focused on preprimer and primer sight words - and sports vocabulary, of course! By limiting how many sentences we work on at a time I can change the degree of difficulty.  Since I'm working 1-1 with my young sports fan we do these on a table top, but they also work really well as a literacy center in a pocket chart - and take up very little space in a busy classroom that way!

Soon we'll switch over to winter sports sentences, and since we're also reading transportation themed sight word readers we'll read and match sentences about cars, trucks, fire engines and more.  I can keep this up for as long as it takes him to master reading! 

So who's winning in this game?  Is it the "Champion of the World", for scoring more points than teacher?  Is it me, for achieving my goal of increasing his reading fluency and skills?  No dear reader, it's better than either of those scenarios, it's a great big win-win!