Our School theme in PreK was full but not overwhelming. I am still getting used to having twelve instead of sixteen students, so I have been thinking that some activities will take longer than they actually do. Because of this I was actually able to get pretty much everything on my lesson plan completed this week. You can find the link to my School theme PreK lesson plan at the end of this post.
Question of the Day
I used some of my Summer Fun Questions in my Question of the Day Bundle. They are great for the beginning and ending of the year. I knew most of my kids would pick house for the question above since we had a hot day the day before and everyone was in houses. We also had not gotten the bubbles out yet.
Sensory Bin
One of the books we read this week with our School theme was Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, so we had a sensory bin with a coconut tree. I got the idea for the tree from Pre-K Pages. I found the contact paper and the plastic greenery at the local dollar store. I will probably have to do some work on the greenery before I use it again since my friends had quite a bit of fun with it and loosened the hot glue I used to help keep it in place.
Play Dough
We also used the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom themed playdough mats from Practically Pre-K. We have the Lakeshore Alphabet Dough Stampers that we used with these mats, although we also let the students just explore the dough any way they liked as well. There are other letter stampers for play dough also available on Amazon, which I have not tried yet (Amazon affiliate link below.)
Fine Motor and Literacy
One of our activities on the math and fine motor table were our jumbo linking cubes. I had put the letters to spell each child’s name on the cubes. Since it is the beginning of the year I made a list of students and color coded the letters. Each color cube had about three students’ letters so that it would not be overwhelming for the students to find their own letters to build names. My assistant worked on this with each child individually. You can find the alphabet letters I used for this in the Alphabet Jumbo Cubes Center. The link to the cubes below is an affiliate link.
At our math and fine motor table we also had our pattern blocks and cubes out to build letter T. The pattern blocks printables come from Confessions of a Homeschooler. You can find the cubes and triangles Lowercase Letter Building in my shop. The letter t is a good one to start with since it does not have triangles. Pattern blocks and cubes and triangles are affiliate linked below.
We have a letter focus each week in my class, with plenty of activities that involve all the letters of the alphabet as well. In addition, we build in a review week to spiral back and review a handful of letters that we have covered. Our letter focus this week was T, so we built words that start with T on our easel. These word cards come from This Reading Mama. I cut them apart to work on my easel. Magnetic Alphabet link is below. The lowercase t is not my favorite, so if you have another suggestion, please let me know.
Science and Writing Centers
I switched placement of my science and writing centers this week. Since science was an activity for one student, it moved to the small table. I put out a flashlight, a mirror and a few black circles of construction paper. Students shined the flashlight on the circles as well as figuring out what happens when you shine the light into the mirror. We did have a mishap at some point with the flashlight, so we need to purchase a new one. My assistant commented that we now have a maraca instead of a flashlight.
The writing center had dry erase markers, name cards, and word cards. The name cards have the student’s photo, the student’s name, and boxes to practice writing each letter of the student’s name. The word cards can be found in my Alphabet Words Letter Tile Cards set. The cards with blanks can be used in your writing center with dry erase, letter stamps, or writing utensils. The word building cards with the lowercase or capital letters can be used with letter tiles.
Chicka Chicka Sensory Bin
We used green rice as our base for our sensory bin. The magnetic alphabet letters are from a long ago order to Oriental Trading. I tried to spell a student’s name on the tree each morning for them to discover.
Chicka Chicka Snack
To complete our week we made a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom snack with pretzel rods, green apples slices, and alphabet cookies. I almost struck out getting something alphabet shaped for this snack since the store had replaced the Cheez-it Scrabble crackers with Spiderman themed ones and there was no Alpha-bits cereal. I found the alphabet cookies in the aisle with the individually packaged snacks.
School and Letter T Book Ideas
My book basket was completely full this week. I made it through many of them. Below are some affiliate links to some of the published books I used. I also used some teacher created books that you can find linked in the lesson plan file.
Free PreK Lesson Plan and Form
My lesson plan for this week has been added to the free lesson plan form file in my Teachers Pay Teachers shop. It includes links to all the books I used as well as songs, crafts, and our Bible story for the week. Links are included for many activities as well. Make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Acrobat to be able to CTRL-click the links.
Other freebies can be found on my Freebies for PreK Teachers page.
