The Very Hungry Caterpillar

I was so sad to miss out on today, but I had two sick kids at home; and my best "go-to" babysitter (my mom) has Shingles.  Ugh! I can't wait for winter and all of these bugs to be gone!  My blog today won't have pictures or as many specifics, but I heard about all of the events of the day...and it sounds like Ryan and Ethan both did great!

The touch and feel pool today was full of multi-colored puff balls that all the kiddos sorted and used to make patterns.  They talked about all the colors and how the puff balls felt.  

Both boys stayed with the rest of the Speech Garden for morning circle and apparently had great attention spans for all of the songs that they sang and calendar concepts that they learned.  They then headed to the big playground and enjoying the change in scenery and playing with the older kids.

For our language lesson today, we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.  This is a famous preschool book and great for teaching how caterpillars turn into butterflies (metamorphosis).  The reader follows the caterpillar through each day of the week as he hatches from a little egg on Sunday, eats through one apple on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, etc....until he builds a chrysalis around himself and emerges as a beautiful butterfly.  There are a million concepts that you can target with this one simple book - days of the week, numbers, colors, vocabulary of a variety of different foods, temporal/sequencing concepts, and the science lesson of metamorphosis, which we told the children means "change."  The book also has great repeating lines to stimulate language learning..."But he was still hungry!"  So as I have said before, use these repeating lines and see if your child can fill in the blank when you leave off the word "hungry."  Also, as Ms. Kelly read the book to Ryan and Ethan, she used sequencing pictures to further comprehension and to also  stimulate their attention to the new vocabulary being introduced.  These cards were sent home with Ryan and Ethan. See if they can help re-tell the story using the picture cards for support.

After the book, Ryan and Ethan went to our classroom with Ms. Margaret to make their own very hungry caterpillars, folded into little books that had each stage of the metamorphosis.  First, a little egg lay on a leaf.  Second, the egg hatches into a caterpillar.  Third, the caterpillar builds a chrysalis around himself.  Last, the caterpillar becomes a beautiful butterfly.    

We watched the following short video to summarize our language lesson today.  

Questions for your kiddos today:
1.  Review the stages of metamorphosis putting emphasis on the temporal concepts first, second, third, last.  See if Ryan and Ethan can use these words expressively by using them as they explain the pictures or...if that's too tricky see if they can understand these words receptively by answering your questions What happens to the caterpillar first? etc.  
2.  Have Ryan and Ethan count the fruit in the book and see if they can use one-to-one correspondence as they count.
3.  As the caterpillar goes through each day of the week, remind Ryan and Ethan of the days of the week song and see if they can either sing the song or say the days of the week without the song.  (We clap our hands instead of snap).

Again, I'm sorry that I missed such a great day, but I hope that you all have a good week.  We will see you next Tuesday as we learn all about bugs that crawl!