Make a meaningful book with your kids as the characters

Does your family / class, love the story "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?"  If so... make your own "Brown bear story" featuring them.

A fun activity is to take your camera with you on an outing to the local zoo.  Snap pictures of your family looking at different zoo animals.   Upload your pictures to the http://www.blurb.com/ and make a book.  Add text to each picture telling whom is looking at each animal. Each book costs about $10 - $20 dollars based off book size and cover material.

For example:

Jessie, Jessie, what do you see?
I see a lion looking at me.

Teacher, Teacher, what do you see?
I see a monkey looking at me.

Family, family what do you see?
A zoo adventure by Jessie Mork-Fishel and Patty Ann Mork-Cline | Make Your Own Book

Letter of the week

To practice the letter of the week, I write a quote that starts with our letter of the week.  I work at a faithbased preschool, so I use Bible verses.  In a public school a teacher could use children book quotes or quotes from authors.   The letter of the week is also the theme for our weekly show and tell time.  Together we read the quote of the week every morning.

Tip: sometimes it might be a challenge to find an item that starts with that letter, as a class we discovered adjectives (ex. my "interesting" book for letter "i") to be helpful as well as proper nouns such as names (ex. "Elizabeth" my doll for letter "e").

place value & Number of days in school

In my classroom I wanted to reinforce using manipulatives to keep track of the current date.  Together the students and I count how many hundreds, tens, and ones we have in each group and what that number is together.  I chose to use magnatized base ten blocks because the students will see place value repesented on state tests more often by these blocks, more so than using traditional straw bundles.

In addition to using the base ten blocks, as a class we also show the number using dollar bills and coins.  The money is a bulletin board cutout set that I attached magnets onto the back.  We also use these coins  to practice counting by ones, fives, and tens.