Apples Theme!

Well last week ended up being pretty hectic, so we didn't get much accomplished in the way of "school".  Yesterday I spent the day lesson planning for the week and today we got started on our apples theme.  I decided we'll start at 9am and end around 12pm, that way she can have lunch and the rest of the day to free play or whatnot and I can work on the house.  She did great for such a ball of energy!  Here are the things we covered today...

While she eats breakfast I usually let her watch her sight words.  We LOVE the Preschool Prep Company's Meet The Sight Words Series (We're on disc 3 of  3!) and she has learned over 45 words in the past 2 months!  And she remembers them ALL!  These DVDs have great characters and it gives us ideas of sentences to use the word in.  It really helps her recall the words when she gets stuck.  I've included a video clip of Meet The Sight Words 3...

We also refresh with games and flashcards and word hunts in our books.  Today we watched one mini lesson (5 words), and reviewed them with our flashcards after.

We read an Autumn poem and highlight all the "A" words and "a's" in the words.  It read...

Signs of Autumn

Signs of autumn are all around:

Apples, scarecrows, leaves on the ground,

Cozy sweaters, and pumpkin pie.

It feels like autumn-my, oh my!

Then we moved on to phonics.  She knows the majority of the letter sounds but since we're doing Apples this week I wanted to focus on 'A' words, so we made a big apple and cut things that start with A out of some magazines I had hanging around for just such an occasion, and glued them on the apple.  She really enjoys using the glue!  : )  It's not perfect but it's the process not the product we're focused on...

After this little project we moved on to our Math.  We are focusing on counting 1-1, number recognition 0-10, and counting 1-15.  She's doing pretty well but tends to get ahead of herself when counting things out.  Today we went out to our crab apple trees and picked 15 little crabbies, then we came in and counted them out to each other, which is simple enough, but E really enjoyed it so we did this for probably 20 minutes!  I was the one who ended up getting bored!  : )  After this I let her watch her Preschool Prep Meet The Numbers DVD and I sliced the apples and got all the ingredients for her snack together.

For our snack we found a great recipe for Apples in a Bag on Salad-in-a-jar.com .  It turned out pretty good, E really liked it, but I will use different apples next time.  All we had were green Michigan Apples today, and they seemed a little tart for something that was supposed to be so sweet.  Nonetheless, she had 2 whole apples this way and they are only 50 some odd calories a piece so it's a pretty good snack.

   

We didn't get to do our art project today because I ended up having to go to dance practice, so we'll have it on here tomorrow.  If anyone has any good apple ideas, please feel free to share!  See you tomorrow!