What’s in the box? Prek Letter T Week!

Hi, I haven’t posted my actual boxes lately, so here’s a glimpse for what’s in our boxes for tomorrow. For Prek we are doing the Letter T this week, you can click here for the entire Letter T collection. My boxes aren’t the traditional shoe boxes, since we don’t have the space, but you can click here to see my school room and what our boxes look like.

1. Calendar activity time: She is in charge of counting the calendar, putting up the next date number and day of the week. We discuss yesterday/tomorrow at this time as well. The pointer is to count the calendar numbers, its always more fun with a pointer! I just realized looking at this picture that I forgot to include her colored chain. We also use our calendar for patterning, so each day we put up a chain piece on a thumb tack that I put in the calendar next to each number. So we do like: red, blue, red, blue, red…etc.

2. Number of the week coloring page: We do 1 number a week, I downloaded this from KidZone. She has a cup full of crayons that stays on her desk, otherwise I would have put them in the box!

3. Turtle Lacing Card!

4. Turtle Size Sort: she matches the Large, Medium, and Small turtles to the correct spot on the board. She’s got the hang of these ‘sizes’ now, so our next letter will be an activity to put them in the correct size order from smallest to biggest or visa versa.

5. Turtle Bottlecap Letter Matching! Easy, just match up the letters! I glued my cut out letters onto the back of a 1 1/2″ wooden disks from Michael’s (Used my little xyron). The original idea uses milk bottle caps, but we didn’t have that many laying around! (Note: You may want to print extra copies of the letters as you can see some words have more than one T in them, like Turtle! You can download the turtle card here and the letters here!

6. Turtle Pre-Writing Practice: I usually cut these into smaller cards, but didn’t feel like it and thought I’d try leaving it as a large page to see if writing was easier her, she was fighting with flipping the cards last time with the Letter B pre-writing…I’ll update this post if it is. You can download it here, and do it like this, or cut along the lines and put on a ring alike a mini-book. You can also print on plain copy paper and use for cutting practice too! 2 for 1!

7. Turtle Puzzle: I cut the puzzle in 6 pieces, I’m finding that’s about all she can handle right now, and then let her figure it out. I usually show her what it’s supposed to look like before she starts (I put it in her box like it is below). When she’s pulling the pieces out of the box they get mixed up, so it works for us. You can download the puzzle here!

8. Large Floor Numbers: This is a favorite in our house, I lay them all out on the floor (in order for now, once she needs a challenge I’ll mix them up). Then call out a number and she has to hop to that number! You can download the cards here!

9. Foam Letter Builders! This is a variation on my magnetic letter builders. I just got some fun foam from Wal-mart and cut them into the same pieces that are on the magnetic letter builders download. She will use them to form letters and possibly numbers…hmmm!

10. Our Letter T reading, we got: The Tortoise and the Hare, and a couple other turtle books from our library Friday afternoon! I have some more reading ideas on my Letter T post.

That’s it for our prek Letter T day 1 boxes!