Letter Y is for You

Day 1   Y is for You     Numbers Review    Money Review
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Free Play in Learning Centers
Circle Time:  Morning learning songs.  Introduce letter Y and review letters A-X.  Read "My Y Book."  Review #’s 1-20.    Review the vowel song.   Begin blending consonants vowels.  Review money. Lately, I have been teaching the children some of the old-time songs and rhymes that I sung as a child.  Thus far, we have learned "This Old Man," "Where is Thumpkin?", and  "Hands On Shoulders,"  "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands.  Teach "Jesus Loves Me," which every child should eventually know.  I still sing it to myself occasionally-it's just a pretty and encouraging song! Teach songs/poems for Mother's Day Tea Party!  Read : "I Like Me!" by Nancy Carkson. This is a timely lesson for two of my students.  They both teared up due to embarrassment on Friday, so we had a long talk about it being okay to mess up, and it is good to be able to laugh at ourselves!  Hopefully this story will help because it discusses embarrassing moments and how to handle them with grace.  Good lesson for adults as well!

Snack: 
Bible: Bible Devotional
Free Play
Group Lesson:  All About Me booklets.  A few years ago, I picked up little booklets with this title.  I will choose the pages I like and put them together into a booklet for my students to fill out.  When we are done, I will read each child's booklet out loud so we can learn more about each of us and what makes us unique and special!
Lunch/Rest:  Read two books while children relax, listen and enjoy! 
Gross Motor/Phys.Ed:  1.  Outdoor play if weather permits.   Aerobics inside:  I will put on some fun music and show the children some movements they can do for exercise:  kicks, jumping jacks, side to sides, knee raises, hamstring curls--this is a little introduction to aerobics! 

Art/Fine Motor:  Cut out a large letter Y from cardstock--yellow cardstock if you have it.  Provide yellow yarn for the kids to line the letter Y with the yellow yarn.  Preschool-aged kids love cutting the yarn into pieces, so they can cut the yard into whatever size pieces they like and glue them onto the letter Y to make a pretty Y!  Yay!
Free Play
Review/Pack up/Dismissal

from:  http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/2010/04/letter-of-the-week-8.html

Day 2   Y is for You     Numbers Review    Money Review

Sign In:  

Free Play in Learning Centers
Circle Time:  Morning learning songs.  Introduce letter Y and review letters A-X.  Read "My Y Book."  Review #’s 1-20.    Review the vowel song.   Begin blending consonants vowels.  Review money. Lately, I have been teaching the children some of the old-time songs and rhymes that I sung as a child.  Thus far, we have learned "This Old Man," "Where is Thumpkin?", and  "Hands On Shoulders,"  "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands.  Teach "Jesus Loves Me," which every child should eventually know.  I still sing it to myself occasionally-it's just a pretty and encouraging song! Teach songs/poems for Mother's Day Tea Party!  Read a book about being yourself!

Snack: 

Bible: Bible story

Free Play

Group Lesson:  All About Me booklets. Yucky Foods Collage/Yummy Foods Collage

Lunch/Rest:  Read two books while children relax, listen and enjoy! 

Gross Motor/Phys.Ed:  1.  Outdoor play if weather permits.   Aerobics inside:  I will put on some fun music and show the children some movements they can do for exercise:  kicks, jumping jacks, side to sides, knee raises, hamstring curls--this is a little introduction to aerobics! 

Art/Fine Motor:  I will give each child a piece of paper, drawing tool, and watered down paint.  They will be asked to draw a picture of their face and then add watered down paint as their hair. While the paint is runny, they will take a straw, blow through it, and make their hair go in different directions by blowing the paint via the straw.
Free Play
Review/Pack up/Dismissal

Day 3   Y is for You     Numbers Review    Money Review

Sign In:  

Free Play in Learning Centers
Circle Time:  Morning learning songs.  Introduce letter Y and review letters A-X.  Read "My Y Book."  Review #’s 1-20.    Review the vowel song.   Begin blending consonants vowels.  Review money. Lately, I have been teaching the children some of the old-time songs and rhymes that I sung as a child.  Thus far, we have learned "This Old Man," "Where is Thumpkin?", and  "Hands On Shoulders,"  "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands.  Teach "Jesus Loves Me," which every child should eventually know.  I still sing it to myself occasionally-it's just a pretty and encouraging song! Teach songs/poems for Mother's Day Tea Party!  Read a book about being yourself.

Snack: 

Bible: 

Free Play

Group Lesson:  All About Me booklets.   What's Missing?  Testing our memory.  I will show the children various items and ask them to look at the items carefully and try to remember what they see.  Then I will ask them to turn around, facing away from the items.  I will take one of the items away.  Then I will tell the children to turn around, look at the items again and tell me what is missing.  I will give them a chance to be the one to "steal" an item from the pile and have the rest of us guess which item has gone missing.  

Lunch/Rest:  Read two books while children relax, listen and enjoy! 

Gross Motor/Phys.Ed:  1.  Outdoor play if weather permits.   Aerobics inside:  I will put on some fun music and show the children some movements they can do for exercise:  kicks, jumping jacks, side to sides, knee raises, hamstring curls--this is a little introduction to aerobics! 

Art/Fine Motor:  Melted Crayons or Shrinky Dinks
Free Play
Review/Pack up/Dismissal

Additional Ideas:

Below:  From Preschool Express

OPPOSITES Here are a list of words, can your child tell you the opposite word that starts with Y?
	Old (Young)
	No (Yes)
	Whisper (Yell)
	Me (You)
	Today (Yesterday)
	YES/NO GAME Show your child hand signals for “yes” and “no”. Arms stretched up like a Y for “yes” and hands on hips for “no”. Ask him some questions and have him answer with these new hand signals.

Body Match Game

Play music and have the children work in pairs. Call out a body part that they need to match. If you say "Knees" the children need to make one or both of their knees touch the knees of their partner!

Letter X, Easter, Earth Day

I am actually already through teaching letter X but did not get a chance to blog on here due to Easter busyness, but I thought I'd write a quick synopsis of what we did.
Letter X Art and Letter Recognition and Fine Motor Practice.  From:  enchantedmommy.com

I gave each child a sheet of white paper on which I had used Washi tape to mark out a letter X.  I instructed them to use various colors of paint (tempura with a little water added to make it runnier) to paint all around the letter X.  I gave them the option of using a paintbrush or a medicine dropper.  They did both.  They liked "sucking up" the paint in the dropper and dropping it on their papers.  Then they took their brushes and spread the paint around the paper.  Once this is dry, you instruct the kids to take off the washi tape, revealing the letter X in white!

Earth Day:  Earth Day took place during the week of teaching Letter X.  We talked a lot about recycling, reusing and repurposing.  The students always seem to be quite interested in this subject each year when I teach it.  They love to hear of the various ways we can help keep God's earth beautiful and clean.

Bible:  I taught about Jesus being the Light of the world and how we are to be lights to others for Jesus.  We made a little tealight holder out of small glass cups I purchased at the thrift store.  We put glue on the outside of the glasses and then simply sprinkled glitter over the glue.  We then tied a ribbon around the top of the glasses and added a tea light.

Madison, one of my students, shared with us an X-ray of her collar bone.  She broke it when she was younger.  We talked about the sound letter X makes.

Mother's Day:  We are continuing working on our Mother's Day gifts, which I won't talk about yet, because my moms might be watching this blog, and it's a secret, so shhhhhh!

The weather has been turning nice, so we are spending lots more time outdoors.  I purchased some items from the thrift store for the kids club house (under my rhododendron bush)--pots, pans, tray, towels, rugs, utensils, play food.  They loved this!  I love all the imagination and discussions that went on.  They work really well together; sometimes I wonder why we adults can do better about working together and collaborating on our ideas!  We need to learn a lesson from children.

We have been doing some worksheets on beginning sounds.  The children are doing really well picking out what letter a word begins with:  violin begins with V, etc.  The older kids are able to sound out some words on their own at this point, which is really amazing to watch!  We are also working on our math skills and doing some math games and worksheets.  For Easter, I took 15 plastic eggs, and on the larger half of an egg I put a particular number of dots; then on the smaller half of the egg, I put a number.  The children then had to match up the numbered eggs with the dotted eggs.  I made sure to not match the eggs up by color, so the kids had to count, not match by color.
http://room-mom101.blogspot.com/2010/03/easter-egg-matching-activity.html?m=1

For my student's Easter egg hunt, I put triangle shapes on 20 eggs, rectangle shapes on 20 eggs, and square shapes on 20 eggs (with Sharpie).  I also put my student's names on approx. 10 eggs--10 per student.  Madison hunted all the eggs with the rectangles, Jake hunted all the eggs with the squares, and Casey hunted all the eggs with the triangles, and then they each hunted with the eggs with their names on them.  Favorite item in each egg was multicolored coin chocolates, found at a shop in Maryland.  We ate pizza and ham, carrots, and lots of different fruits for our Easter celebration lunch.  Lots of fun!

Another Easter art project was an Easter egg wreath.  I gave each student egg-shaped pieces of paper (about 14 each) and allowed them to paint them in any design or color they liked.  Once they dried, I glued them around the edge of a blue, green or pink paper plate.  I did not cut the center of the plate out, but left it and had the kids write "Happy Easter" on the middle of the plate.  Cute!  Found on jennwa.blogspot.com

We also made Resurrection Cookies:  Found on motherhoodonadime.com--Great way to explain the Easter story!

Another teaching game we did, and the kids loved it and stayed with it for a long time:  http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/2014/04/color-number-easter-eggs.html.  Simply prepare the markers with numbers, have the children take turns selecting a number from a pile of number cards, and then they choose the marker that corresponds with the number on their card.  They keep choosing cards until they have a variety of colors on their eggs.  My students found that rubbing the color with a paper towel made a cool marbled effect, and it was very pretty!  Don't eat!!!!