Book Love: My Heart is Like a Zoo

My Heart is Like a Zoo by Michael Hall is a simple book that can be used in many different ways. The adorable and creative illustrations are made out of hearts, which can make it a fun read for Valentine's Day. But the story can also lend itself as a book to talk about different animals, or different ways that we feel or see ourselves.

Read-Aloud Tips: We read this book two times together as a class. The first time, we focused on the hearts in each illustration. Sometimes we counted them, sometimes we just talked about what shapes or parts of the animal they formed. The second time we read it, we focused more on the story itself and the feelings involved. For example, we discussed feeling vocabulary words like what it means to be "eager as a beaver."  Or we made connections to feelings, like thinking about times we've felt "angry as a bear." It's a great book for sparking discussions about feelings.

Extension Activity: I fell in love with this book back in my Kindergarten teaching days, and I've always wanted to use it as inspiration for some animal art. This year was finally the year that I made it happen! I just cut out a bunch of hearts in different shapes and sizes, and let the kids use the book as a guide for ideas. It was fun to see what they created!

I encouraged the kids to label their picture with the name of the animal they created, and I was pleased to observe some great sound spelling. I then used their animals to create a zoo art display.

Playing Post Office

First, you need to write some letters and put them on an envelope with a stamp.

Don't forget to write the name of the person you are sending it to on the envelope.

Then you stick them in the mailbox.

When it's pick-up time, you bring the letters to the post office for sorting.

Then deliver them to the correct individual mailboxes.

This dramatic play has been so great for:
*Writing practice
*Fine motor skills like putting paper in envelopes and using stickers
*Working together with others while sorting and delivering the mail
*Thinking about others in a caring way

I especially loved watching some great friendship skills in action during this play, like asking someone what their favorite color is so they could use it on their letter or drawing a picture of something they knew their friend liked.

A Little Penguin Fun

During our polar animal unit, we especially focused on penguins.

Penguins on Puffy Snow Art

The kids loved using puffy snow paint so much, that we brought it back out again to create some penguin pictures.

For this project, I modeled drawing a penguin with basic shapes and it was really fun to see how the students applied that to their own work.

Don't Feed the Penguin Game

I was inspired by this game to make this number recognition game. 

I made the little fish out of orange pipe cleaner, and added the tweezers for an extra fine motor challenge.

Shape Penguins Craft

I cut out a bunch of different kinds of shapes, and the students were free to use whichever ones they wanted to create their penguin.

Journal Writing

In the end, it was fun to see what everyone had learned about penguins as they wrote in their journals. One boy told me he didn't know that penguins had tails, one drew about a penguin sitting on an egg to keep it warm, one told me a story about a penguin diving into the water. The one above made sure to use yellow because he wanted to make an emperor penguin.

Math Bags and Writing Journals

This year I decided to change up my end-of-the-day routines to include math and writing on a regular basis. As with all the regular routines that I use in my classroom, I wanted these routines to be simple enough to be consistent, but also allow room for growth and individualization.

Math Bags

I found this idea for Math Bags on my favorite preschool blog, Teach Preschool, and wanted to try it out this as our weekly math routine. I love it because it is simple, very open-ended, and it allows the kids to be invested in the manipulatives we are using. So every Tuesday the students are bringing in up to 5 small, miscellaneous items from home that they are willing to donate to what we've been calling our "Math Collection."

First, everyone gets a chance to share what they brought, like a mini show-and-tell. This part of the process is a great chance for the kids to practice their oral language skills, and hopefully develop confidence with math vocabulary as the year progresses as well. Sometimes the kids will share stories with us about where they found the items, and sometimes they will just tell us what they brought. I always encourage them to count and tell us how many items there are, which allows me to observe their development of number sense and one-to-one correspondence.

How we interact with the items after the sharing time will vary throughout the year. Right now we are focusing on careful counting strategies, like lining the items up and touching them as we count.

This week we added sorting to the routine, and organized the items by color.

So far, I feel like it has been a successful routine and I'm excited to watch it grow and adapt as the students build their mathematical understanding. As our collection grows, I am also planning to include the items for different math activities in center choices time as well.

Writing Journals

The second routine that I've added to the end of the day is writing in our journals on Thursdays. Their writing journals are always available to them during center time, and many students use them on a regular basis for their own creative purposes. But I wanted to devote some additional time to writing about common learning topics together so that students could learn from each other and we could focus on specific writing skills where appropriate. 

Of course, writing in preschool is very developmental and can be as simple as making marks on the page. No matter the stage of writing development among my students, I emphasize the meaning behind whatever they are scribbling, drawing, or trying to write by asking them to tell me about their work. Then I model the writing process by recording what they tell me on the paper. 

This is also a great way for me to check in with the information they are processing and learning from our theme units. For example, today I prompted the students to write about sunflowers today since that has been our focus topic. It was interesting to hear the different aspects of sunflowers that each student focused on as they told me about their writing. Some told me about how the seeds come from the head of the flower, and some told me about the parts of the flower like the petals and the long, green stem, etc. 

 

As a teacher, I love using writing journals consistently because it is such a visual way to document growth over time. It's such a simple routine, and I'm glad that I've found a regular place for it in our weekly schedule.