Week 3: Yummy Yucky Holiday Edition, Hot Chocolate, and Caroling

Date:  December Week 3

Title:  Yummy Yucky Holiday Edition

Phoneme: /m/

Pre-Literacy:  Trace the Letter M.  “Draw up the mountain. Go back down. Draw up the mountain, and down to the town.”  Talk about words that have the /m/ sound.  Merry. Moo. Mouse. Me. Does anyone have a name with the /m/ sound?

Materials required:  Laminated Letter M, Laminated Santa parts, Yummy Yucky Book, Feed the Woozle Game, food items from our preschool kitchen and nonfood items such as sequins, glue, playdough, books, and toys

Concepts: What Questions, Foods, non Foods

Transition activity:  Song:  Must Be Santa, by Raffi

Discussion:  We’re going to discuss Yummy holiday foods (candy canes, cookies, hot chocolate with marshmallows) and yucky nonfoods (ornaments, tinsel, ribbons, pine needles, markers, paint, glitter).

What foods do you like?

What foods do you not like?

What should we NEVER put in our mouths?

At snack time, I will bring my hot chocolate maker and provide hot chocolate with marshmallows!  The kids are also building marshmallow snowmen in Miss Julie's classroom.

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We're feeding the Woozle.  He likes foods that are yummy I'm adapting the game specific for today's activity).  The nonfoods will be put into a box.  The kids loved taking turns feeding the Woozle with the big blue spoon.

Activity: Caroling at the front office to sing our Must Be Santa song and Jingle Bells.  The children did so well singing and shaking their jingle bells!  The ladies in the front office and our principal thanked them for coming and singing so well.

December Week 2: MAD!!! (and other Emotions)

Large  Group Activity

Date:  December Week 2

Title:  MAD!!! (and other Emotions)

Phoneme: /m/

Pre-Literacy:  Trace the Letter M.  “Draw up the mountain. Go back down. Draw up the mountain, and down to the town.”  Talk about words that have the /m/ sound.  Merry. Moo. Mouse. Me. Does anyone have a name with the /m/ sound?

Materials required:  Laminated Letter M, Laminated Santa parts,

Song: Jim Gill “You’re Face Will Surely Show It”'

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Book:  How Do Dinosaurs Say I'm Mad? By Jane Yolen and Mark Teague

Concepts:  Emotions, What /How Questions.

Transition activity:  Song:  Must Be Santa, by Raffi

Discussion:  Let’s talk about MAD!  Show me your mad face.  Look at my mad face.  How do you know that I’m mad?  Can you do a happy face?  Look at my happy face.  How do you know that I’m happy?  Can you make a sad face?  Look at my sad face.  How do you know I’m sad?  Go through scared, sleepy, cold, surprised, silly too.

Is it okay to be mad?  Sure it is.  Is it okay to throw toys, kick chairs, pitch a fit, or hit our friends?  NO!  We want to be careful with our friends and the things in our classroom.  So what can we do when we're mad?  In this book we learn we can count to 10 and take a deep breath.  We practiced doing this along with the dinosaur in the book. We can also say "STOP!", be a problem solver, or ask a teacher to help us solve the problem.

Play Jim Gill’s “You’re Face Will Surely Show It” song.  Point out how there are ways everyone acts the same and there are ways everyone acts differently when they are mad, sad, or happy.  

After note:  I asked every child to pick a face to show the rest of the class so we could guess.  We had a great range of happy, sad, scared, mad, sleepy, surprised, and silly.  They thought it was great fun, especially silly faces.

Feeding Activity from Pre-K Jabber!

My colleague, Stephanie, over at Pre-K Jabber has a fun activity called Feed The Woozle.  I can see doing this at home by coloring a monster face and putting it on a box with an open mouth and feeding the monster  what is good to eat and "trashing" what is not good to eat.

I love this idea so much that I am going to try it in our classroom soon.

Go see it by clicking here.

December Language Calendar

The Moog Center puts out a fun calendar full of ideas to help you work on increasing your child's language at home.  Here is December's calendar.  You can download a print a copy by clicking here.

At my house, with my 13 year old daughter who has Down syndrome, I am teaching her how to cook.  We are talking about measuring, pouring, stirring, cutting, cleaning, and wiping.  We're talking about fractions, and narrating actions.  Her favorite part?  Yelling "HOT BEHIND!" like a chef when she passes behind someone with something hot in her hands.  She also likes to tell everyone at the dinner table what she prepared and give them a play-by-play narration of how she did it.

Modify the calendar as needed for your child. 

December Week 1: Soft/Loud and Slow/Fast

Large  Group Activity

Date:  December Week 1

Title:  Music

Phoneme: /M/

Pre-Literacy:  Trace the Letter M.  “Draw up the mountain. Go back down. Draw up the mountain, and down to the town.”  Talk about words that have the /m/ sound.  Merry. Moo. Mouse. Me. Does anyone have a name with the /m/ sound?

Materials required:  Laminated Letter M, Laminated Santa parts, classical music, movie sound tracks, lullabies, rhythm sticks

Book: Quiet Loud

Concepts:  Music, Fast/Slow, high/Low, Loud/Soft, Who questions

Transition activity:  Song:  Must Be Santa, by Raffi

We're practicing to go caroling to the front office later this month.  We're singing Must Be Santa and Jingle Bells.  We're putting together our own Santa as we sing (see picture at the top). Don't forget to clap-clap right before "Must be Santa" in the chorus!

Discussion:  listen to the Santa Song.  Do we sing loud or soft?  When do we sing high?  When do we sing low?

Now let's listen to other songs.  We listened to Star Wars, Bridge Over The River Kwai, As Time Goes By, Libertango, Sing Sing Sing, and Taylor Swift's Shake It Off. (but I'm linking this Disney parody because it is hilarious.)  Use rhythm sticks to keep the beat.  Is the music fast or slow?  Is it loud or soft?

Now use your voice like a fire engine to go high and low.  Whisper, Inside table talk voice, Outside loud voice.  Ouch, Outside voices are too loud inside the classroom.

What voice do we use in the classroom?  Inside voice?

What voice do we use in the hallway.  Voices off.

What voice do we use on the playground?  Outside voice.