Reading Bling

Alphabet Crowns. Blending Buttons. Digraph Diamonds. Oh my!

Your preschooler will learn the sounds the alphabet makes (two sounds for vowels) and earn her sparkly Alphabet Crown. She will have a chance to decorate it herself and have her name put up on our preschool wall. This is a BIG accomplishment that is a small, simple step to reading.

Her next skill to acquire will be recognizing a combination of a short vowel sound and a consonant.

a + t = at. And she's READING! Gaining proficiency in sounding out short vowels and consonants will earn her the next bit of Reading Bling: her Blending Button.

From there we'll focus on adding common digraphs like sh, th, and ck to her rapidly expanding reading skills. Be sure to applaud, ooh and ahh when she takes her Digraph Diamond out of her bag when she comes home. Before you know it, your little reader will be reading to you at night.

These are the three basic pieces of Reading Bling your child will earn as he learns. Without realizing he's "working" he'll become a skilled reader. The more your child is ready to tackle, the more Bling will be available: Sight Word Sword, etc.

Come Play With Us!

Thank you for visiting Kurious Kiddies. Last year I had the absolute pleasure of participating in a neighborhood coop for preschool aged children. These delightful four year olds were a joy to be with.

I love to create enriching opportunities and found the preschool experience very rewarding. I have decided to hold an educational playdate twice a week in my home during the 2010-2011 school year. I do not have a teaching degree, but I can guarantee that your child will learn much at Kurious Kiddies preschool.

Why send your child into my home twice a week, entrusting me to help them socialize, love learning and play? Here is a short list of reasons you may consider.

My home is stocked in children's educational materials:
Workbooks, videos, flashcards, early readers, games, music, developmental toys and a home library featuring over 2500 children's books.

I have a ten year old son in the gifted program at Saratoga Shores and both my ten year old and five year old attended preschool at Challenger Schools. I have learned a great deal about teaching children from working with my own and from observing successful teachers.

I love education and have tried to create a child friendly home: safe to explore, things to discover and unexpected surprises are threaded throughout. We will be holding our preschool in our 480 square foot toy room. My yard is fenced. It is a smoke free home.

During their 3 hour playgroup, we will explore a variety of subjects. I will send a newsletter home each month on what we're covering: animals, ocean, holidays, safety, plants, space, dinosaurs, etc. At our weekly ask the teacher question, each child will be encouraged to bring any question they have. My children at home spend their lunches asking me "How do they make glass for windows?" and "Why does it rain?" and "How did the soda get bubbly?" Send your little one each week with a question and if I don't know the answer, I'll get it for them.

I believe curiosity is imperative to learning.

Your children will sing, do art projects, work on writing skills, work on reading skills and have plenty of time to play, snack and stoke their imaginations.

Please feel free to look at some of the posts on this blog to get a feel for what is in store for your child when you sign them up to Kurious Kiddies. The lessons featured are from last year's preschool and each of these children are Kindergardeners for the 2010-2011 school year. (I intend on repeating these lessons with your little ones.)

Classes are Tuesday/Thursday or Wednesday/Friday
9:00 a.m. - 12:00
September-May
$80 a month
One time $12 application fee
Snack provided
Canvas school bag given to each child to personalize (No need to purchase backpacks or school supplies.)
Parents are encouraged to drop children off ten minutes early each morning.

Please contact Megan Millington at 766-1343 or herdofmillingtons@hotmail.com.

Space is limited to eight children per group.

Beavers!

My theme for the next four sessions is Animal Homes. Today we reviewed the letter M, and the color orange, reviewed vowels, learned to draw spiders and watched a clip from Life of Mammals about beavers.





We learned that beavers can drag giant branches from trees, that the water in the winter time keeps the leaves fresh at right above freezing temperatures, thus explaining why beavers don't hibernate, and we learned that both dams and the beaver's home are made from rocks, branches, leaves and mud.





For snack time, the kids made their own beaver dams with rocks (chocolate chips), mud (a scoop of peanut butter), leaves (candy leaf sprinkles) and logs (straight pretzels.)

Jocelyn was our weather girl for the day but she didn't predict our snowstorm! It's definitely October in Utah.

Preschool Grizzlies and Halloween Fun

Preschoolers are so adorable. I love them. They want to learn, they're enamored by every detail and almost anything you want to teach them is new to them. That is my kind of student!!!

Today we reviewed the letter N, added 'th" to "sh" that we learned on Tuesday and noticed that "th" tickles our tongues. We continued identifying vowels.



The animal home we learned about today was a cave in Alaska where grizzly bears spend their winter. We learned about hibernation and the big difference between beavers staying awake all winter from our last class to why our great big grizzlies need to sleep all winter-there's just not enough food around to keep a large mammal fed in the middle of the blizzards. The Life of Mammals segment showed a grizzly sleeping--and snoring! Grizzlies lose 1,000,000 calories. Yes, that is ONE MILLION calories while they hibernate for 5-6 months and wake up very hungry. It was neat to learn that they eat roots (we eat carrots and potatoes), then grass (we eat salads), then on to meat (like us!), berries (really, really like us!) and then on to salmon (like most of us who eat fish.) By the end of the summer salmon run the bears were big, fat and hairy again. Wow!

Then our little preschool grizzlies hibernated and woke up to spring finding themselves starving.









We enjoyed cookies (The Bumpy Little Pumpkin was the inspiration for not so perfect jack o lantern cookies) for snacks, Halloween stories were read, Halloween Bingo was played and then they experienced the toy room with the lights off, fog machine on and adorned with glow necklaces.

Happy Halloween Millington Style!

Desert Life

What to say about today? Stir crazy kids. (To be fair, Trey was his usual focused self.) Between Noah running around like mad and "helping" and Jocelyn being contrary and everyone seeming to have spring fever today, I hope the kids got something out of today's lesson on deserts.

We tried really hard to focus and pay attention and worked on getting our wiggles out with an extended outdoor playtime, Hullaballoo and the Hokey Pokey.

We learned that some deserts get rain, lots of it. We watched time lapse photography from Planet Earth as the Saguaro cactus swelled immensely after a rain storm. We also saw various animals from the Australia, The Gobi, The Sahara and other deserts such as camels, fennec foxes, elephants, birds, lizards and kangaroos try to live in such harsh environments.

We reviewed letter "o", we added "ch" and "wh" to our other digraphs, and the kids made their own sand art. Some chose to do sand dunes, some created sand mountains. Super cute.

I think Thursday we'll cover elephants!!!!!

Elephants!

Elephants, elephants, elephants!

Preschool was awesome on Thursday. We learned so much about elephants and the places they live. We watched a few minutes of Life of Mammals and Planet Earth. On Planet Earth we watched desert elephants in the Sahara dig up roots of grasses to eat. Desert elephants only have to drink every five days! The Life of Mammals segment showed elephants actually knocking acacia trees over to eat the leaves at the top where there are few if any spines.

We read two books based on a real life elephant: Nosey. My Aunt was a child in Fresno when the children raised money through bake sales and collecting their coins to purchase Nosey for their zoo. Our preschoolers thought it was really neat to read a book about a "real" elephant!

We reviewed our digraphs: ch, wh, th and sh, reviewed and practiced writing letter "p" and did some cute elephant puzzles and finally assembled an elephant flip book.

For snack time the kids got their very own elephant trunks: bananas and ate peanuts just like elephants do! We practiced holding tails like a baby elephant does with his Mommy and curled our trunks (arms) to greet each other. Super fun, super cute day.

























The cutest elephant:

Valentine's Day

Today was Jocelyn's preschool Valentine's Day Party. So much pinkness, so little time. Big thank you to Amy for setting it up! And the cookies were unbelievable.

The kids played games, decorated cookies, made Valentines to deliver to Sister Southworth (and delivered them), exchanged Valentines and ate as much sugar as possible. All in all, a successful preschool party!

















































































































Little brothers, big cupcakes!

Springtime in Preschool!

I chose to teach the subject of plants. Today we covered the different components of a plant and their function: roots, leaves, stems, buds and flowers. The kids perused seed and plant catalogs, selecting their favorite plant and then identifying whether the picture showed roots, leaves, stems, buds or flowers.

We learned a new song to "row row row row your boat"
dig dig dig the dirt,
then we plant the seeds,
a gentle rain
the warm sunshine
will help our flowers grow.

We planted pumpkin seeds (is it warm enough on a window to germinate???) and we had a ton of fun examining the potatoes that have been sprouting. Lots of oohs, ahhs and eeeewwws later, we inserted the toothpicks and set them in clear glasses to watch what happens. Cute little kids wanted to keep checking to see if the pumpkins were growing. Too bad I'm bereft of a little "bippity boppity boo!"

Plant Parts!

Preschool

We continued our studies of plants today! After the kids
(sadly) discovered that their seeds hadn't sprouted yet, we worked on our "Seeds" books, played a couple spring counting/matching games, worked on mazes (I didn't mean to go through all of them today! I'll have to find some more), designed their own gardens from the seed catalogs and then we went upstairs to talk about what parts of plants people eat. Fortunately, everyone was able to enjoy an outside recess before the storm blew in!

The kids were fascinated that we ate all different parts of a plant, depending on the plant:

ROOTS
carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas (we included potatoes here)
SEEDS
lima beans, peas, green beans, sunflower seeds, black-eyed peas, pinto beans
FRUITS
tomato, apple, cucumber, strawberries, blueberries, pumpkins
FLOWERS
broccoli, cauliflower, squash blossoms, artichokes, nasturtiums
LEAVES
kale, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, collards, mustard, herbs
STEMS
celery, rhubarb, green onions

I challenged them to look at the produce at the grocery stores and see if they could figure out what part of the plant ya'll were going to eat.

(Funnily enough, I thought I had to postpone this activity because I hadn't bought fresh produce since the weekend and we eat through it pretty quickly, but as I started pulling stuff out of the fridge I realized I had more than I had thought. I'm thinking I'm a pretty good Mom! Look at all that healthy stuff. Can you say Beef and Broccoli for dinner tonight? And stir fry tomorrow? And Mexican on the weekend?)

And I cannot believe what a "hit" the nuts were! I told them their Moms would have to help crack them but that they could eat all the peanuts they wanted to open themselves. Let's just say you don't want to see my counters and floors in my kitchen. Most kids took an adult sized handful of nuts home in their backpacks. And they were all impressed that a jar full of nuts would make a yard full of trees.

Next week we'll continue our study of plants by doing dissections of various fruit to tell the different types of seeds they make. Can't wait!













Aren't they adorable?

Jocelyn, Sienna, Sophie







Jocelyn's "garden." She has fantastic cottage style taste, if I do say so myself.



















Concentrating SO hard to count the spots on the ladybugs. Look at her chubbs! She's still a little honey, even if I tell her she's a "big girl."

Books we read today: The Acorn and the OakTree and Under the Ground.