Monday February 28th- Planets

On this make up day for our three year olds, we first started with our name practice and then we did an additional practice with Miss Alisha’s help. Upstairs the students played with wooden and foam blocks and nuts and bolts. My daughter Emma was at home today with the day off and she read all the books the kids wanted her to read to them :) Garrett was our star from last week so he helped start our day with shape and colors practice. They have them all down and I think that I will start assessing these skills in a different way- to change it up a bit. We practice counting and our days of the week song during calendar time. I told them that today is the last day of the month and that we would be starting March tomorrow. Our room will also change as well as our library with the change of the month and themes of the classes. We all helped with weather time and then we did our alphabet boogie. The students remembered that we were learning about the letter S and silly Sally Seal who lives near the South Pole. We remembered the sound that the S makes- just like a snake and we also practice the sign- making our hand like a fist. After we sang our S song, we practiced Hey Diddle Diddle one last time all by ourselves and then went into wiggle time. Garrett brought us a yummy snack of s foods. After that we looked at our books and played with Garrett’s show and tell.
Because of our lesson today on planets, I did our letter time first. We practiced our sound again for the letter S and then went to the table to do our S sheet. We colored strawberry, sock, shoe, and sun. They each practiced tracing the letter S on their own and I wrote their names in highlighter and they traced on top on it. I want them to start writing their names on their own- at least attempting it.
For our lesson, we listened to our Planets song and then we talked about each one. We sang each line as we learned about each individual planet. First we talked about the Sun and it is not a planet but the closest star to us. Then we discussed Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The song also mentions Pluto but I changed the words and we add “it’s not a planet at all”- it is a dwarf planet and not considered the normal planet as it used to be. We each colored a planet and we made then each a necklace. Then we put all the “planets” in order and we sang our song twice as we stood around in a circle so that we could all see each planet in the solar system. For a special treat, I had the class watch Blue’s Clues where the song is shown about the planets. They sang along when the song came on. That was our day all about the planets!