Preschool this week: Cat in the Hat and Bedtime!

This week we started the vowels for Preschool. Some of the girls are reading, so it was a review, but we did lots of sounding out words during the lesssons.


For our lesson, we listed words with short vowel A sounds (cat, hat, bag, ball, fan, etc). I wrote all the words on the board, we sounded them out, then the girls matched pictures with the words. Then we read Cat in the Hat. And had goldfish for snack, because of the goldfish in the book.

For our activity we made Cat in the Hat Hats.

1. Take a strip of white butcher paper, about 18 inches by 24 inches.
2. We glued red strips across (need about 1 1/2 pieces of red construction paper, with 1-2 inch strips).
3. Then cut 2 inch cuts across the bottom of the paper. These are for easy taping into the hat lid.
4. Cut a hole in a paper plate to fit onto the child's head. My plates left about a 1 inch circle. See below.
5. Tape the huge hat together into a tube, then attach the strips inside the plate like the picture shows.
   

Now go be the cat in the Hat!

For the rest of preschool, we listened to the "Cat came back" song by Laurie Berkner, and acted like cats.

For the rest of preschool we

• read some more cat books
• talked about what to do when strangers knock on the door when your parents are sleeping or can't come to the door
• Learned a rhyme about cats, and put up pictures for each line

Another great idea is to have the kids try to balance things on their head or legs like the cat does in the book.

On thursday we did Bedtime Preschool.

We wrote out short vowel e words (bed, hen, ten, jet, sew, etc), and matched pictures with words. We sang Ten In Bed with ten little cardstock teddy bears. I wrote "10 in bed" on the board, and pointed to it everytime we got to that line, and erased the 10 and wrote the new number every time. The kids held up their fingers and practiced subtracting and counting backwards.


Then we sewed some pillows for our stuffed animals bedtime.

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I basically folded 6 by 6 pieces of fabric over, tied some contrasting embroidery floss in one corner, let them sew with larger needles all the way around, stuffed, then sewed close. They did pretty good once they learned to pull the string all the way through.

For the rest of preschool we:

• read Bedtime books (Good night moon, Max's Bedtime, Ten in Bed popup book)
• made beds on the couches while they listened
• talked about brushing our teeth before bed
• listened to some lullabies.