Jj week

Monday- The week started off great. Kid particiapation is always good. I made a quick jungle diarama before we started. It got their attention and they followed me to the preschool table. I let them color the letter Jj while we sang the ABC song. The we talked about some J words which we don't usually do at the beginning of the week. We talked about jungle, jam, jelly, peioples' names, and Jesus. I didn't plan it. It's Monday 'My God' Day and I plan to sing songs about Jesus every Monday starting today. Beautiful segue. I had laminated different pictures of Jesus last year to use in Nursery and a sacrament quiet book. I pulled out 4 of them that represented 4 song I wanted to sing. I started with the short ones and plan to teach the others one at a time. The kids didn't sing but they listened well.
Then I read an article from the Friend Magazine and it just happened to mention one of the songs we sang. Another beautiful, unplanned segue. We put our snakes we made last week in the jungle diarama. Accidentaly left it down and two of the snakes broke. Slipped right back together with some elmer's glue. Amazing. Way to go play dough.
Then I had this great idea to have all of this groups letters represented in out diarama. Spent all day looking for an animal that lived in the jungle that started with the letter U. Never found one so I settled for the upside down tree; Baobab. My husband came home and I told him what I did today and he went to the computer and found, oh, twenty five immediately. I guess I never typed in "animals that begin with U." Two thumbs up for the husband. Two thumbs up for first-school.ws/INDEX.HTM for having coloring pages for a few of them.


Tuesday- Made my star template with the right angle. Took quite a bit of calculating. Do you want to know? Divide 360 degrees by 5. This finds the inside angle if you divide a pentagon into triangles, which is 72 degrees. Which means the other two angles of that triangle are 54 degrees because they are equal and 180 minus 72 is 108 divided by 2 is 54. There's more. Now you draw straight lines off the pentagon to make the points of the star. You add up two of the outside angles of the pentagon triangles and subtract that from 180 degrees to find the angle in the star part. So 72 degrees is the angle for each side of the triangle in the star. Add those together and subtract that from 180 degrees. 180 minus 144(or 72+72) is 36. This is the angle you need to make a triangle shape for your star template. Wasn't that easy. Bwahahaha! In the end, I made the outside of the template a circle and it looks like Pacman. Later, I thought, I could have changed the circle in the first idea into a pentagon, follow the dot-to-dot and boom, a star. Could have displayed the Pentagon with the big flag they on it in 2001.


We made a practice flag. It was left over from last week's stars and stripes activity. The kids didn't use the star templates at all. Are you surprised? I tried all of my star templates that I made. The Pacman was the best but only because I never used a compass on the other templates. 5yo did help me draw stripes on our practice flag. The down side is that we used washable markers on fabric and our hands were covered with red and blue. When 8yo came home and played with it, he was covered with blue. But it was fun and the kids were very interested in how to fold a flag.
We also talked about Lady Justice and I tried to explain the scale and the blind fold and the sword. I'm sure they didn't get it. But the next time I have to be the judge in a sibling dispute, I'll try to explain it again. I found a Brite Music packet at the library. Janeen Brady has written a lot of music for difficult subjects to teach kids. This one is called Take your hat off when the Flag Goes By! A child's Musical Introduction to the Constitution. A cd goes with it and you hear a father and son at a parade talking and singing about all sorts of good stuff. The first song talks about taking your hat off for the flag which is all I wanted the preschool kids to learn. The other topics are a little too mature for preschool.
Then we read two books covering the Pledge of Allegiance. One describes each word of the pledge. I pledge allegiance by Bill Martin Jr and Michael Sampson. The other The Pledge of Allegiance by Norman Pearl talks about the birth of the pledge and why it was created.
Then I repeated "and justice for all" while I had my hand over my heart and tried to get the kids to do the same.

Wednesday- Today didn't work out. I planned to make really big letters on the floor with jump ropes. The jump ropes were to kincked to lay flat in the way that we wanted them to. They are now draped over the bookshelf, hopefully unkincking them selves for a later day. I showed the kids how to jump rope. They were very interested, but will need a lot more exposure.

Thursday- The kids didn't really care what letter their last name started and that the person who gave it to us was dead. 5yo did seem to make new connections of who everyone's mothers and fathers were on our family tree.
Friday- I had way too many things left over for this week. I ended up needing every single one of them. 5yo is really resistant to participating. I tried to teach him how to make triangles out of strips of paper. The first one didn't work out, more of a trapazoid, and he quit. He rarely tries again with me. I have to remember that he's a perfectionist and will hopefully just do it one day when he's figured it out in his head. But I do feel like he needs to practice, at least try. I had printed out a pumkin with the word 'jack-o-lantern' on the bottom and we were going to make the whole face using triangles. My creative son knew that he wanted a long straight strip for the mouth. Luckily he was able to explain that to me.
He didn't want to glue, didn't want to tape, didn't want to draw. He did want to cut out the orange pumpkin from construction paper. (I told you I printed some pumpkins, but we had so many triangles that I wanted to make more) He asked me how to do it and I told him to cut the corners off. It didn't go very well. "I hate preschool!" I turned on the computer and went to starfall.com.  I clicked on the pumpkin and taught him how to make his own virtual jack-o-lantern while I cut stems for the pumkins. I pasted everything on to the pumpkins and was able to get him to at least pick which stem went on each pumpkin. Than we hung them on the door. Then he said he wanted skeletons with red eyes and red triangle teeth that 'were all scrunchy.' I cut everything out and he put the teeth on in a scrunchy manner because I didn't do it right. Awesome- some participation.
The boys have several jungle sets and we used one of the jaguars for our jungle diarama. I was starting to read about jaguars when somebody found the jingle bells. I couldn't compete with the noise and didn't want anyone to get in trouble so we sang 'Jingle Bells,' 'Santa Clause is coming to Town,' and Sleigh Bells.' Then I whipped out the Jj page and asked them to look for the jingle bells. We talked about the other things that started with J and when I noticed that they set down their jingle bells, I took them quietly.
We then read about jaguars and as I read that jaguar cubs were blind I thought that we should have done a blind activity this week because Lady Justice is blind as well. We could have done it with the jump-ropes. Two people hold each end while someone blind folded could find their way across the room holding on to the rope. Then they could not use the rope to see how much harder it is.