Play With Words

We are in the throws of learning all about the parts of a tree. Between our school sports day, the officially Sports Day holiday and me being in Hong Kong for 3 days last week, we lost a bit of instructional time and are still working our way through week 1 of this months unit In The Orchard. Today we did "Day 4", all about what grows on tree branches.

At morning meeting, we listened to the Months of the Year song on our new Mother Goose Time CD, which talks about the rings of the tree growing each year, which was a great segue into the science activity we missed last Thursday, mostly due to teacher error (as in, I read the directions in the teacher planning guide and they did not compute) Thankfully, I received some very helpful feedback from a few other MGT users over the weekend, so we had a much more successful learning experience about tree trunks today (teacher included!). 

We reviewed the previous parts of the tree we have learned so far and I was quite surprised when I mentioned roots, and one student responded immediately with "R-O-O-T-S!", the Day 2 song that's been nearly 2 weeks since we sang it.  Today's song was about things that grow on the branches of a tree, so after the "red apple" part, I asked the kids to give me examples of other fruits that grow on trees. 

I pulled the "fruit of the Spirit" story pieces that corresponded with the fruit that was mentioned, one of them being "red cherries". Several students immediately identified the word "joy" on the cherry. I asked if they wanted to learn a new song about joy, and they were very eager. I learned this song as missionary kid many years ago, in 3 rounds and after some research, it appears that it might be a combination of a couple different songs. Rather than trying to teach 9 preschoolers to sing 3 different things at the same time, I just picked the 2 easy parts and did a "girls" verse and a "boys" verse. It was super cute!

             

     Girls: "J is for Jesus, O is for Others, Y y y y y y is for You, you, you, you, you, you"

     Boys: "Joy, joy, joy...I've got joy, joy, joy...I've got joy, joy, joy...I've got joy, joy, joy"

They did such a great job writing the letter "A-a" in their Little Journals today, and came up with really creative pictures and words that start with "A". 

Some mighty, green angels

A is for "Anju" (her BFF in class)

Before story time, I scoured the book shelves in the upstairs hallway for some tree/fall/harvest science related books, and also chose Apple Banana Cherry for our read aloud book, since it tied so nicely into everything we talked about today. It just so happens that the author's name is Joy, which was possibly their most exciting discovery of the day!  

Ah, the joy of learning in preschool! :)