Wednesday January 19th- Places to work: police station & post office

 

To start our day, we practiced our names and headed upstairs to play with bionicles, beads and little legos. I took each child aside to do an activity with them involving mailing letters. I had each child pick an envelope and on each one I had written a student’s name. Once they picked, we wrote a note to that student talking about favorite toys, trips and play dates :) I wanted to really have the opportunity for the kids to see the post office’s work in action with mailing these letters to each other.
Jackson helped with circle time and reviewing our letter and sounds we have learned so far. We practiced counting to 30 again, Spanish to 11 and blastoff counting. Because Monday was a makeup day, we reviewed a different letter. This week’s letter is Q and we learned that Q has a friend- the letter U- we rarely see them not together. I have a song that I had the kids listen to so they could hear the sound and different words that “Qu” are in. It is a fun lively song and many of the students jammed along. I read some words that start with Q but that list was very short. After we practiced the sign and sound of Q, we did our alphabet boogie and wiggle song. After snack time, we did a short library break and then we were on to our lesson about the post office. We learned about mailman Oz and his route throughout the town. Also that he starts and ends his day at the post office. For our table time, we finished our notes to our friends with stickers on the front. I was hoping that they would think of their friend they were writing to and choose some stickers for them, but that is a lot to ask of a 4 year old :) We sealed up each letter and then I talked about stamps and how they are needed to pay for the letter to get to your house. I also discussed how a letter looks on the front and what kind of info is needed to send a letter.
For a police station job, we learned that we don’t need to drive a police car to work for a police station- that there are many types of jobs there. We discussed them and learned that a police officer’s job is to help and protect us.
For letter time, we practiced our Q letter by tracing the letter, the shapes and coloring it nicely. I also stamped each child’s hand with the Q as we practiced the sound. Then we finished the day with our Q story- the Quiet Quail and we learned that it is sometimes good to be noisy.