Persevering and T

We've been working on the letter T and have been talking about perseverance. We read the story of "The Hare and the Tortoise" and discussed it; we talked about the meaning of perseverance and ways that we may have to persevere in our lives; and we made turtle-shaped badges that said, "I don't quit. I persevere".

We also read the Bible story of Nehemiah and how he had to persevere in rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem, even when he met opposition. After reading the story, the kids drew a Nehemiah face on styrofoam cups (because Nehemiah was a cupbearer!) and we retold the story using the cups and some other props. There was a cup with a sad-faced Nehemiah (for when he went to talk to the king about feeling sad about the ruined city), a cup for a happy-faced Nehemiah (for when he was told he could go help rebuild) and some building blocks were the rubble.

The kids then had to build their own walls using the blocks.



It was a good lesson on perseverance because not only were they learning about the Bible story, but the walls they were building didn't always want to keep standing up, so they had to continue working on them!

We had a train snack using two types of crackers, cheese, pretzels, summer sausage, and bananas.

The fun thing about pretzels is that they can also be used for creating words - like MAT and FAN.

Roll and Color Turtle game - She rolled two dice and added up the sum of them. What ever number the sum was, she had to color that number on her turtle picture. This game started off to be pretty fun, but then we got down to only the numbers 4 and 12, and she just couldn't seem to roll those numbers! So then we added in extra dice to get to the number 12, and in order to reach number 4, both she and I were rolling a pair of dice. We finally got them, but it took us quite awhile!
(www.makinglearningfun.com)

Train Domino Addition - she picked a random domino piece from a few that I had selected ahead of time, and she had to count the dots on each side and write that number in the train car boxes. Then she had to add up the total sum of the dots and write that number in the engine box. I made sure that none of the sums went above the number 14, since that's the highest number we have worked on so far.
(www.makinglearningfun.com)

Counting by Tens Train
We used Q-tips dipped in paint to dab 10 dots above each train car. This project ended up being more messy than I would have liked, but that's a paint project for you!
(www.makinglearningfun.com)

A story about perseverance and our lowercase "t" train

And of course, there was the ultimate lesson in perseverance...

Not fully mastered yet, but definitely a good start on it!