Story Time at Ready-Set-Grow Preschool and Child Care

My husband and I have owned a wonderful child care center for almost 10 years in Bountiful, Utah.  I've spent many, many hours there teaching preschool at the beginning when we first owned it, and this summer I am taking a couple of hours a week to do story time, music and an art project.  I thought some of you preschool/Pre-K would benefit from what I have been up to.  So here goes:

At the beginning of the summer we just oriented the kids to the summer "way of doing things".

June 17th was Transportation Week:  Here is what I did.

Stories:  "Freight Train" by Donald Crew, "The Wheels on the Bus" by Raffi and "Trucks" by Donald Crew

Songs:  "Down by the Station Early in the Morning", "The Wheels on the Bus", (we moved the chairs so the kids felt like they were sitting on a bus), "Hurry, Hurry Drive the Fire Truck".  (Just google any of these titles and I'm sure a you tube video will pop up to teach you how to sing them."  I played the guitar on some of then and gave a triangle, the instrument, to a student for the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding part of the last song.  Next time I'll give one to all the kids.  We used a spoon to hit the triangle with.

The lyrics to the first song go like this:
Down by the station early in the morning
See the little pufferbellies all in a row.
See the station master turn the little handle.
Puff, puff, toot, toot, off we go.

AIR, LAND, OR SEA:  Then I gave a different vehicle to each child and drew on a while board 3 simple lines to divide the air, land and sea from each other.  Each child came up and named their vehicle and put it in the correct place.

Art:  Last of all we made trains using squares, rectangles and triangles cut from construction paper.  We used cotton for the clouds, straight pretzel sticks for the "Logs" each car was hauling and uncooked "wagon wheel" pasta for the wheels.  They turned out darling.

June 24th:  Today, the theme was "On the Farm"

Stories:  "Pigs" by Robert Munsch; "Ruby in Her Own Time" by Jonathan Emmett; and "To Market, To Market" by Anne Miranda






 I chose 2 to read and then we sang these songs:
Songs:  "Old McDonald" and "Down by Grandpa's Farm".
I changed the words to Down by Grandpa's Farm to say:

Down by grandpa's farm there is a big fat pig, (repeat)
The pig, he spells his name like this: P-I-G  (repeat)
Oh, we're on our way, we're on our way, on our way to grandpa's farm. 
We're on our way, we're on our way, on our way to Grandpa's farm. 
(We practiced spelling the words and I had this paper up.)

 

The kids were able to read it, sing it and follow my modeling.  This is a great literacy activity.  As you can see, we also graphed everyone's favorite farm animal, which is a great math visual.  The kids could clearly see which animal won the highest number of votes. 

 

Craft Activity:  We make clothes pin horses using a body of a horse, without the legs, copied onto cardstock.  The legs are the clothes pins, which make the horse stand up.  Go to busybeekidscrafts.com to get a copy of the horse. 

 

The kids colored the horses, cut them out, added the legs and yarn for the mane and tail.  They turned out really cute and the kids loved them.  Sorry, no finished copy to show you.