i is for insect

Today we talked about the letter "i" and insects.  We spent a good half hour singing through all of the nursery rhymes we have learned so far this year.  The kids love music time and it has been on the back burner the last few weeks. New Fish no longer feels the need to get dressed for school and she comes in her pjs most of the time.  I will be curious to see if she tries to wear her jammies to school next year.

We practiced counting to 20 and identifying all of the numbers.  They have no problems with this but I like to do the same group of numbers for a really long time.  Theses two kids are only three years old after all.  There is no rush.  They have learned so much this year, they are ready for Kindergarten but New Fish still have two more years of preschool before she will be going.

 We sang there was an old lady who swallowed a fly today for the first time.  We read from The Usbourne Children's Encyclopedia and Caterpillars and Butterflies.  We looked at pictures of the life cycle of a butterfly and discussed them and learned about the different parts of an insect.  We read The Hungry Hungry Caterpillar and The Very Angry Ladybug by Eric Carle and did some Eric Carle threading cards.  We did prewriting worksheets and practiced drawing and coloring their own patterns.  We did a new stack of file folder games (they love file folder games) and worked on learning rhyming words and opposites.  New Fish has gotten really good at rhyming.  We also played the honey bee tree game at the very end.  We play a lot of games and I think they are really great for teaching them to follow directions and take turns.

 We spent a good chunk of time observing our insects that we have been watching for the past two weeks.  Three of our six catepillars have formed a cysalis and hopefully the others will start in the next couple of days.  It was good timing for the kids to see what is happening to them.  The ants are tunneling around like crazy and the girls want to check on them first thing in the morning to see what they have been up to.  The girls want to get a tadpole next.  I'm tempted to do it because we have had so much fun watching the bugs.  Too bad we don't have a pond nearby to catch them.  I used to grow them in buckets of hundreds when I was little.