O Week is off to a great start!  Vowels can be tricky for young learners because they make two different sounds.  It’s difficult to try to listen for words that begin with either the long or short O sound, so we have been listening for words with those vowel sounds in the middle.  In so doing, we’ve always been discussing rhyming and what an appropriate time for “O” rhymes, since we’ve finally gotten some snow!  The Tugboats had a great time free playing in the snowy open areas of Bremen St. Park.  In the fall, we spent a lot of time in those open areas playing structured games, and also enjoying the freedom to simply run and play, but it’s been some time since we did that.  Today was a great day for it!  There were just a couple of inches of soft snow from the weekend and the kiddos had a blast building tiny little snowpeople.  And we all realized that snow has a great big O sound in the middle!

Back inside, we read one of my favorite books, Oh The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss.  As with many Dr. Seuss books, the message of this story goes a lot farther with adults than it does with children.  Seuss uses such fantastical rhymes, whimsical words, and phenomenal illustrations that most young children are fascinated and enthralled, but struggle to piece together the author’s very moving and emotional sentiment.  His use of rhyme, however, fit perfectly with our emphasis on the O sound.  We got lots of practice at listening for the letter of the week!

Finally, the Tugboats enjoyed one of our favorite projects, the letter of the week decoration.  Today we decorated our letter Os with orange paint and o-shaped objects!  The children used small rolls of tape, round board game pawns, and straws to stamp various Os on their Os.  As they did so, they made observations about which items carried the most paint and which carried the least.  The game pawns, with their smaller handles, deposited large globs of paint on the paper.  The straws, with their super thin plastic, used very little paint and made the thinnest lines.  The tape was nestled in the middle of the range.  Altogether, we used an overwhelming amount of orange paint!