It's a New Week

Naptime got away from me yesterday before I was able to post.  Pesky laundry!  LOL!  Anyway, we started letter C, the color yellow and our shape is the square.  I haven't fully planned what I want to do this week, so I went into circle time with no specific goals other than to introduce the new concepts.  The kids took over though.  After practicing the hard /c/, we read Copycats from the AlphaTales series by Scholastic.  The kids enjoyed finding the "c" words in the picture at the end of the story.  We also compared squares to rectangles and discussed the differences and then found several examples of each and talked about why one was/wasn't a square.  I was just about to sit the kids at the table for free "coloring" when someone said, "Mickey Mouse starts with c," and then it mushroomed from there!

The immediate response from E was, "No it doesn't."  I asked her what it started with then.  She made the /m/ sound and carefully surveyed the alphabet we have displayed on the wall making the /m/ sound over and over until she located the M.  "M," she said, "not C."  So, I wrote Mickey Mouse out on the whiteboard and pointed out that while it does start with M, it does have a C in it which makes the /c/ sound.  Somehow we made the switch to parents' names and whose name started with what and the kids were pointing out similarities in names faster than I could write them.  Finally when the whiteboard was full of everyone's name, every parent's name and Mickey Mouse, and there where circles and underlines and arrows all over the place.  Finally, I told the kids we had to stop.  I was already 20 minutes late starting lunch, eek!  They happily went off to free play and I happily went off to make lunch thinking about how far they've come in such a short time.  Learning is an amazing thing!