Our Co-Op Preschool: REWIND: February 20th,The letter W-- WORDS, WHEAT, AND WORK!

To start out the day, we took turns rolling our giant dice, counting the number of dots, and then finding that number of letters/numbers in the pile that were the same color as the dots!

After we found them we would name the letters or numbers we had founds. Our friends were nice to help us with any tricky ones.

After circle time, we got out our letter "W" again....

...and took turns making the "W" "sit" on our friends!

When the W would sit on them it would change the way their name sounded!!!

"Willaby Wallaby Wobby! A "W" sat on Robby!"

Then we talked about how we had almost learned about every single letter so far in our preschool! We discussed why we are learning letters and what we can use them for-TO MAKE WORDS!

Where do we see words every day?

"On signs. On shirts. In books."

We looked in a book and saw how each page had words on it. And we can tell when one word stops and a new word begins because there is a little space between them.

We were each given a different strip of paper that had words on it from a story.

We used our scissors to cut each word off.

Remember-- cut where there is a little space!

Then we each ended up with a little pile of words!

Some words were long, some were short.

Next, we learned that if we know the sounds that letters make, we can start to read some simple words!

Three friends would line up and Miss Jenni would give them each a letter.

An H for Levi, E for Robby, and N for Lexi.

After we made sure we each knew what sound our own letter made, Miss Jenni would point at each of us one at a time and we would make our sound. She would do it a little faster each time until we could figure out what the word said!

Make the sounds...

"Hhh!" "Eeehhh!" "Nnnnn!"

"HEN!"

"P" "I" "G"

"PIG!"

"R" "A" "T"

"RAT!"

We were reading!!! Hooray!!

Now it was time to help miss Jenni tell us a story.

Every body picked a word out of a jar. We had to figure out what the word said to know which character we were in the story.

DOG put on some floppy ears.

PIG would put on a funny pig nose.

CAT got cute cat ears.

And the main character in our story got to wear some feathery red wings-- a little red HEN.

As Miss Jenni went along in the story, we had to watch for our cues and be ready to recognize our WORDS! When ever she got to the word DOG in the story, she would hold up the word DOG before she said it, and all the dogs would have to bark. The cats would meow when she held up CAT. And of course the pigs would oink when PIG was held up.

The little red hen would flap her wings.

The story of the Little Red Hen is about a little hen who finds a grain of wheat and asks all the animals who will help her to plant it, harvest it, make it into flour, make the flour into bread, etc. Every time she asks for help each of the animals says "Not I!"

Poor Carly (our little red hen) was doing all the work herself!!!

That is, until she asks who will help her EAT the bread. Then they all volunteer! But, the Little Red Hen tells them that since they didn't help her with any of the WORK, they don't get to eat the bread. From then on, all of the animals on the farm decided they would all help with the work.

So, we looked at our grains of wheat and pretended to plant them.

We took turns watering our wheat "every day" until it grew big and tall.

Then it was time to harvest! We all picked the wheat stalks and piled them up.

Then we each took a stalk of wheat and Miss Jenni showed us where to get the grains of wheat off of the stalks! We all held and felt the grains of wheat. We realized that these were the same as the "seed" that was planted to make the wheat grow.

But another thing you can do with the wheat grains is grind them into flour!!!

Miss Jenni had a bag of wheat grains (wheat berries) and we carried them over to our wheat grinder.

It was an awesome machine with big, hard stones inside of it that were going to spin when we turned it on and break those hard little seeds up until they were super fine flour! We got to look inside the machine and feel the stones and spin them a little with our hands (WITH THE MACHINE OFF AND UNPLUGGED OF COURSE!!!)

Then Miss Jenni put the cover back on, and poured the wheat grains in and turned on the machine!

It was super loud and made some of us a little nervous! But most of us watched from a safe distance as the seeds disappeared down the little hole and little puffs of flour started floating in the air! When it was all done, we pulled out a drawer in the bottom of the wheat grinder and it was full of flour!!