Popular Work Last Week
I came across these 'petting zoo' figurines at AC Moore - they were just too cute to leave behind, and I thought that they would be perfect for practicing initial sounds. The children have been busy developing initial sound mastery. Every day we review all of the sounds at morning meeting with our sound puppets and at least once a day, I try to sit with each child and go over a sound box and its matching sandpaper letters. I can see tremendous growth in all of the children since the start of school in this area! Most of the children have completed their red sound book and are now working on the blue book. Watch for these little books to come home. Have your student read the book to you and return it to school for more daily practice. In this 'petting zoo' work, the children take the word cards out of the little wooden box and then choose one figure at a time out of the rice and then match it to its matching word card. As you can tell most of these words are too difficult for the children to read in isolation, but the children can hear the first letter in the word, they use this 'clue' to find the correct word card. Soon they will be able to read the entire word! The children love fishing through the rice looking for the figures - almost as much as they like hiding them in the rice when the work is over!
This child is using the letter writing supplies to write a letter to her friend. This is Moriah Bruehl's letter writing paper from Playful Learning. 
These two young men are working on both fine motor and sorting activities. The activity to the left consist of little Halloween erasers that have to be sorted with tweezers and placed into the pumpkin ice tray. Manipulating the tweezers further strengthens those hand muscles in preperation for writing.
The little guy in the lower half of the picture is sewing a pumpkin costume onto a little man. Again, great fine motor development.
This young lady is working with the word drawers. Once the word and picture cards are matched together, the child then uses the punches to punch the word on the orange paper. Once the words are all punched out, they are stapled together in a book to go home. The children have also enjoyed punching other words that they know how to spell, their names, mom, dad, cat! I'm so proud of them!
