Ants and the Letter A

I am really behind on blogging about preschool!  I've been stock piling pictures on my camera because I wasn't sure where my usb cord was, and I wasn't about to post about preschool without pictures.

Two weeks ago the theme was the letter A and Ants.  The first day of the week we just worked on the letter A, number 1, short A sound, and some other super cool stuff.  Then on Tuesday we got going with Ants.

We learned some ant vocabulary, ant body parts, the toddlers worked on learning their body parts. So far Little man has nose and feet down, is getting the hang of mouth, and my toddler daycare girl nose all her basics and was working on cheeks and lips.

This was the Letter A word wall.  I am not expecting my 3 and 4 year old to learn to read these words.  The point was for them to recognize the letter A in words, to understand that letters make up words, and that words have meaning (the pictures next to them, which they helped me match up).  Then the words stay up all week, we keep coming back to them, and they have the opportunity to possibly remember them by sight.

We made ants out of egg cartons, which helped them to remember how many legs ants have, and to compare that to us and other animals.  Look out kids, there's a giant brown ant about to eat your snack!  This day the kids also used their "mandibles" to pick up and eat their goldfish snack.  I wish I had a picture of that, it was pretty funny:o)

We made fingerprint ant pictures, painted a letter A, and made ants out of playdough. Read books like, The Ant Bully, and The Magic School Bus Gets Ants in its Pants.  We sang songs and learned fingerplays about ants.  One favorite activity was for Dramatic Play/Large Muscle.  We made our "colony" under the table, then went into the living room/playroom to find "food" which was a bucket of large legos.  We then carried our "food" with our "mandibles" all the way back to the colony.  We made ants on a log, and explored ants outside with magnifying glasses. 

We did a lot more that was unrelated to Ants as well.  The toddlers are starting to learn to count, and the preschoolers are fine-tuning their one-to-one correspondence during math, and getting the hang of those upper-teen numbers that are always tricky.

On an unrelated note, we pulled out some dress-up stuff, and Babydoll showed us some awesome ninja moves! :o)

Next up... the letter B and Birds.