Last Friday morning I had a short preschool orientation to allow the kids and parents to get better acquainted with me and each other. Today was our first official day and it went very well. The children were excited to be here and had fun learning about the letter “A” and apples.
We started by reading the book Ten Red Apples by Pat Hutchins. I numbered ten paper apples and set them out before I read the book. Each time an animal ate an apple I took one away until they were all gone.
We also learned a new finger play today.
Ten Red Apples
Ten red apples grew on a tree. (Hold up ten fingers)
Five for you and five for me. (Hold up five fingers and then five more.)
Help me shake the tree just so, (Pretend to shake a tree.)
And ten red apples down below. (Motion ten fingers going down.)
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10
After our story and circle time we made the apple craft pictured above. I gave each child a red lowercase letter “a”. The children traced the letter with their fingers before gluing it to a white piece of paper. They glued a brown stem and green leaf to the top, and added five black “seeds” to the center. I got this idea from Totally Tots.
Later we painted with apples. I put a popsicle stick in each apple half so that the children would have better control of their apple as they painted.
The children used their apples to paint “A” papers from DLTK-Kids. These will go in their alphabet binders. They were having so much fun painting that I gave them additional paper on which to paint.At snack time we ate homemade applesauce (Thanks, Mom!) and cut up apples with caramel dip. Yummy!
Finally, we played the apple fishing game I created last year. The kids had fun “fishing” and it was also good number recognition practice.
We had a great morning. Friday the children will return and we will study more about the letter “A” and ants.
