Z is for zoo...

Happy Wednesday!

Today has been another busy and eventful day. There was a buzz of excitment in the air as we celebrated another birthday. It's our forth one this month! We all had a great time singing Happy Birthday and there may have been some homemade chocolate cake involved.

Above is a picture of our latest artistic venture, but this activity goes beyond the children just exhibiting their creative flair. Let me share all of the skills associated with our zoo pictures.

Sound/Symbol Relationship- The children have been exposed to and are beginning to understand that each letter we learn makes it's own special sound. This week we are focusing on the letter Zz and the /z/ sound. To reinforce this concept we have been talking a lot about the zoo.

Introductory Concepts of Print- At the top of their picture each child glued the question "Who lives in the zoo?" The purposed of this is to introduce the children to the concepts that letters in print create words, which have meaning.

Language Development and Vocabulary Building - To enhance the children's vocabulary we named each animal and discussed the location they had placed each animal on their paper (on, next to, under, over, beside). This was a great way to work on prepositions.

Color Identification- We identified the color of each animal and played a game to strengthen their color identification skills.

Sorting - Before we began to make our zoo picture, we sorted the foam stickers into groups by each type of animal. This led to playing another game relating to patterns.

Patterns - After sorting the animals into their different groups, the children were then asked to pick two different animals. Once they had picked their two favorite animals, I gave them four of each, for a total of eight. At this time we created a simple ABAB pattern using their two animals. For example, one child picked a giraffe and an elephant. So together we created the following pattern: giraffe, elephant, giraffe, elephant, giraffe, elephant, giraffe, elephant. The children loved this! We we definately be doing more patterns again soon!

Fine Motor - And last, but certainly not least, we worked on developing the small muscles in our friends little hands by having them peel the backing off of each sticker before they placed it on their papers.

What a great day!!! I wanted to take a second and thank you for all of the positive emails and feedback I have received. I know many of you have expressed the desire to want to make comments after each post but have been unable to do so unless you have a blogger account with Google. I am still researching the best option for how to correct this. I feel it's important to share your thoughts with everyone and would love to be able to have a dialog beyond email that can be shared with others. I will let you know as soon as I have this "kink" worked out.