Thursday, September 25, 2008

It's Ellie Elephant!

This week went by very quickly! I can't believe we are already 5 weeks into the school year!

Here are a few pictures from our adventures with Ellie Elephant!
On Mondays (during Circle Time) I introduce the animal/signal/sound we will focus on for that week. While the children are playing in centers I will work individually or with a small group talking about the letter again, the animal, its sound. We will look at how the letter is formed and depending on the ability of the child we may look at some words that have that sound in them or the child may practice identifying the letter. I encourage them to take the paper home and share with their family the sound and signal of our weekly animal. If the sound is an easy one to detect(and again if the child is ready) I will encourage them to look for words at home that have that sound in them. It takes time for a child's ear to be trained to hear certain sounds in words.
Here the children are exploring an egg. We looked at a book about a duck coming from an egg. We talked about what might come out of a chicken egg. Then I gave them each an egg and a magnifying glass. We talked about what the shell looked like. Then they cracked their egg into their tray so they could examine it. Afterwards we made a venn diagram write down their observations.

We used the leftover eggshells(plus the ones you all sent in....THANKS!) to break into small pieces and cover an "e".

Ellie Elephant's signal is her grabbing a peanut with her trunk and putting it in her mouth. So when we signal /e/ our arm is the trunk and we pretend we are bringing a peanut to our mouth while saying /e/. We did some math work using peanuts as counters.
Since we were on the number 5 I introduced 5 pennies = 1 nickel. Here they are looking for different letters and numbers on their coins.

The children created their own "Ellie Elephants" using paper plates. We talked about how to get the color grey by mixing black and white together.


The finished Ellie...complete with a peanut!
learning objectives: begins to demonstrate part of and whole with real objects; enjoys listening to and responding to books; becomes increasingly sensitive to the sounds of spoken words; counts concrete objects to five or higher; shares observations and findings with others through pictures, discussions, or dramatizations

2 comments:

Kelly said...

You have the cutest and most interesting projects! Your excitement and zest for teaching have truly rubbed off on Todd. I'm surprised though that he never talked about the egg!!!!

the Villamor's said...

We have so much fun together!! I just love the Zoo Phonics program!