(gentle inspiring music) - Hello little learners.

Welcome back to our pre-K and TK classroom.

I'm your teacher, Miss Lara, so excited to be here with you today on this wonderful sun-shiny morning, hello!

Now remember, this week we're learning all about kindergarten.

Have you heard someone tell you, oh, you're going to be going to kindergarten next year.

Kindergarten is another grade where you get to learn how to read and write and do math problems and you get recess and have a wonderful loving teacher.

So I hope you're excited to go.

Let add another magnet to our board, today is day four of the five days that we're gonna be learning about kindergarten.

See one on top, three on the bottom, and one and three together make?

Four.

If I put one on top here, two and two?

Still four.

I'll put that down on there.

Let me tell you about our day.

So first we're going to sing our song, the one with the rhythm and the pattern, then we're going to learn some vocabulary words, because vocabulary is key to understanding whatever it is that you read.

If you don't understand the words, how are you gonna know what the book is saying?

We're gonna read a book, practice our syllables by doing a syllable sort and I'm gonna leave you with an activity that you can do at home to continue to practice your letters and letter sounds or whatever it is that you're working on.

That sound like a good plan?

Okay, let's start off with our song.

Here we go, making a rhythm, getting our hands ready, doing little hand aerobics, and it goes like this, ♪ Bread and butter ♪ ♪ Marmalade and Jam ♪ ♪ Let's say hello as quiet as we can ♪ Ready?

♪ Hello ♪ Super quiet, not even a mouse heard you.

♪ Bread and butter ♪ ♪ Marmalade and Jam ♪ ♪ Let's say hello as as loud as we can ♪ ♪ Hello ♪ ♪ Bread and butter ♪ ♪ Marmalade and Jam ♪ ♪ Let's say hello as slow as we can ♪ ♪ Hello ♪ That was pretty slow.

Next one.

♪ Bread and butter ♪ ♪ Marmalade and Jam ♪ ♪ Let's say hello as fast as we can ♪ ♪ Hello ♪ Oh, that was pretty fast.

Can you do it faster?

♪ Bread and butter ♪ ♪ Marmalade and Jam ♪ ♪ Let's say hello as high as we can ♪ ♪ Hello ♪ ♪ Bread and butter ♪ ♪ Marmalade and Jam ♪ ♪ Lets end by saying saying hello as low as we can ♪ ♪ Hello.

♪ Very deep voice, okay.

I love singing songs with you, let's move on to learning our vocabulary words.

So there behind this story here.

Our book today is called, "If I Built a School."

If built a school, try to think what would you put in your school?

I think these words are gonna give us clues about what's in our book, let's see our first word, pitifully.

Oh, that's a big word, pitifully.

It's in a way that is very bad or sad.

So if something was built pitifully, it's very bad or very sad, not good enough.

The next word is similar, special letter S, similar.

It means kind of being the same.

So similar things are not exactly the same, they're just kind of the same.

Like, you might have brown hair and someone else might have brown hair, but their brown is different than your brown, so they're not exactly the same, they're just?

Similar, that's right.

All right, word three, this word means collide, special letter C, collide.

And it means to crash or come together with force.

You collide like two cars crashing, instead of crashing, they would collide like that.

Okay, you're ready to see our book?

Here it comes out of the box, fresh from delivery, "If I Built a School" by Chris Van Dusen, let's pick up our box now, we have to have it ready for our next delivery of course.

And if you'll notice at the front of the story is a student and he has a dog and I think that's the teacher.

Think about of the schools that you visited.

Hmm, they have buildings, they might have a playground, but I think if you could change some things, you might add some things, right?

Like me, I would add a huge chocolate fountain and it would be required for everyone to drink from it right before they got into class.

I don't think the teachers would like that very much, so let's see what our student would add if he built a school.

Jack on the playground said to Ms. Jane, "This school is okay, that it's pitifully plain."

Do you remember pitiful means sad or bad?

"The builder who built this I think should be banned.

It's nothing at all like the school I have planned."

So there he is at school and he wants to plan his own school.

If I built a school, the first thing you'd meet are lots of cute puppies.

They flock to your feet, but why stop at puppies?

Why not a whole zoo?

So I'd add a bunch of big animals too, which you'll see says welcome to school.

And there's a panda, and an elephant and a zebra, do you see other animals?

Did you notice the big giraffe in the back looking a little confused?

Are there smaller animals that you notice?

Right off the lobby, to get to your class, I'd set up a system of tubes made of glass.

You hop in a pod, press the number, then zoom!

In under 10 seconds, you're right at your room.

That would be so cool if you can go to school in a tube.

Look at, they even have a little machine here to carry you, I think I want that at my school.

All of the classrooms are built onto towers that sprout from the school yard like colorful flowers and like giant petals that welcome the day, the roof's open up in a similar way, panels fold back and they let in the sun, which frankly makes being there that much more fun.

So he's using his imagination to create the school of his dreams and as his school, they would have tall towers that look like flowers.

Look, there they are, inside having school.

That would be fun to have school in the grass.

What is he inventing now?

Look, let's read.

Now comes your classroom, isn't it grand?

The free floating platform is where you would stand and using a stylus, you'd write in the air, no blackboard, no whiteboard, no nothing is there.

Your words just appear and they magically glow.

Don't ask how this works 'cause I don't really know.

So imagine having a pen that could write in the sky and then your words would glow?

That's super cool, I like his school, I wanna go to his school.

Oh, he has robots.

This reminds me of a movie that I saw where everyone moved around in robots.

Would you want robots at your school?

But you're not the only one floating around, check out the desks, they don't touch the ground.

They hover like hover desks, see how they glide?

They even have bumpers in case you collide.

Remember we learned that word?

Collide means to crash with force.

So that's true, wouldn't you be playing bumper cars all day long?

Oh, do you recognize this?

It's a T-Rex and Abraham Lincoln, he was the president.

What are they doing in the classroom?

In my kind of classes we wouldn't have tests.

I'd liven things up with some hologram guess.

Hologram means there's like an image there that you can't really touch it, see through, but it looks like it's there.

Here are some samples of what I've been thinking, you might need a T-Rex or Abraham Lincoln, whoa.

I don't know if I'd wanna meet a T-Rex.

(laughs) Look at the teacher she's looking up, well, this looks like a giant bean stock like "Jack and the Beanstalk."

oh, that's what it is.

I think they're in the library.

Are they gonna make books come alive?

Let's read.

The library's next, so let's have a look, you won't find your everyday regular book.

These books come alive when removed from the racks, they put pop up like popups, but pop to the max, and if you're not sure what a book is about, you'll find out quite quickly when something pops out.

How would you like books to open up and have a big beanstock or a UFO like this?

I would say that happens in your imagination.

Now what is he gonna do?

What would you do if your school look like this?

Do you think you would wanna go?

Or would it get boring after a while?

It's now time for recess, let's head out the door, my playground is awesome, so much to explore.

Fly on the zip line way up in the sky or slide down the twisty slide, three stories high, and after all that, if you're not feeling your best in your beat, then you can go tubing.

Now wouldn't that be sweet?

My school will amaze you.

My school will astound.

By far the most fabulous school to be found!

Perfectly planned and impeccably clean.

On a scale of one to 10, it's more like 15 and learning is fun in a place that's fun too.

If I built a school, that's just what I'd do.

So look at there's the teacher thinking, should we make some tubes?

The end.

So what do you think, if you built a school, what would it look like?

Use your imagination.

Would you have zoo animals and tubes and tunnels like in this book?

Or maybe you'd have something different like giant Lego buildings that you get to climb to go to your next class?

I hope that you write and read more about these types of books, all about fun ways to make school interesting.

Now speaking of interesting, what's more interesting than syllables?

Okay, I can name a few things, but syllables are pretty fun because you get to clap or stomp them out and right here, we have a syllable sort and we have the numbers; one, two, three, and four.

Now you'll remember, syllables are the chunks of words, they're the parts of words and taking them apart is important to foundational rating skills, let's see.

I have some words here, see if you can help me stomp 'em out or clap 'em out, I might clap 'em.

The first one is free-floating.

Let's see where we're gonna put it, I almost put it in the one, free-floating.

How many?

Free-floating, three, that's right.

Let's find the three, there it is.

Three syllables in that word.

The next one is playground.

How many syllables or parts does the word playground have?

Let's see, playground.

Two, that's right, one, two, I'm gonna put you down here.

The next word is puppies.

Do you remember in the story our character wanted to build a school with puppies that would flock to your feet?

Let's clap it out, puppies.

Two, that's right.

Here we go, one, two.

So far for two, we have playground and puppies.

The next one is a zoo and that's what our character wants to turn our school into a zoo.

Zoo, let's clap it out, zoo.

Just one, right here it goes.

The next one is hover.

Hover, like the hover boards, they wanna use hover.

Let's clap it out, hover, two again.

Oh, the two is getting full.

See if we can find some other grams, another word, hologram.

Let's clap it out, hologram.

Three, here we go, right on the three.

The four is getting pretty lonely.

We have a few more to go.

Gym, gym, gym.

A gym is a place where you go work out and it has one syllable, gym.

Do we have one more, one last one in my golden basket.

And this one is skydiving, let's clap it out.

Skydiving, three, that's right.

So we're gonna put it with the number three.

So look, we have one, two, three down here and three more in the three.

Practice sounding out syllables in the words around you, like, do you have a table?

Table or a desk or a chair or a couch?

Clap out everything that you see that you can remember what it's called.

Right now, we're gonna go over to our project place because I have a fun activity that you can use to practice your letter recognition skills at home.

That's super important for kindergarten, you'll be so fancy if you go to kindergarten knowing all your letters and letters sounds, so let's walk over there.

Okay, let's see the materials that you're going to need, you're going to need a box.

So I picked this one up at the place where everything costs one dollar, but you don't have to get a box that you buy, you can actually get a box that you have at home.

I just didn't have one and I think, I got tired of taking all the cereal out of my boxes to use them, popsicle sticks, then you're gonna need cupcake liners, again, hopefully things you don't have to buy, a marker, some glue, and then some stickers.

Some letter stickers if you have 'em, if not, you can use your marker, and a scissor.

So luckily I have mine here, actually used an X-ACTO knife too, so you can use something to make a hole in your box.

Hey, what we're going to do is we're gonna make a flower garden.

So this is what one of the flowers is gonna look like.

It's gonna have a letter in the middle and then the big cupcake liner around and a popsicle stick's, then we're gonna make holes in our box to put our flower in.

Now you'll notice this is a letter matching activity because I have the letter A here and the letter A at the bottom, so I've matched them.

You can put pictures at the bottom and match beginning sounds, you could do syllables, that would be so much fun, write the words or put numbers here and then put them in, so I'm gonna teach you how to make one.

And we might even fancy up this box so it looks like a real garden.

So the first thing you're gonna wanna do is take your popsicle stick and a cupcake liner, maybe I'll try a pink one, they have pink, yellow, blue, but I think pink will look good.

I'm gonna open up my glue dot, dot, not a lot and put some glue at the end of my popsicle stick, right there.

Then I'm gonna glue down my cupcake liner, I'm gonna hold it for 10 seconds, 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, and done.

Might wanna let it dry just a little longer and then put a letter in there.

So I'm gonna take my letter sticker and put the letter B.

Now this is what it looks like.

Let's do one more together, or a few more.

Take my popsicle stick, put the glue in there, put the cupcake liner, hold it down and then maybe pick a letter.

So I'm gonna pick the letter, M. Is that one of your special letters, M?

I always feel like I've forgotten some special letters when I do my special letter activity.

So let's do a few more.

Hey, and then glue cupcake liner, sticker and I'll tell you if you don't have the stickers that I do, and I got these the place where everything costs a dollar, but you may not have 'em, just use your marker and write 'em down right in the center before you put your glue on.

Let's make one more, then we'll move on to cutting out this way, cutting out our box, L for Lara, of course, right in the center, here we go, so I have five.

So this is what our box is gonna look like.

Here's the tricky part, you need to find a way to make a hole in the box.

So I'm gonna do that with the end of some scissors that can be kinda tricky to go through, so make sure you ask a grownup for it, some help in doing this, okay?

Then two, three, four, and five, all the way around.

The next thing you're gonna wanna do, see my holes?

You gonna need is for the popsicle stick to kind of fit through and stay snug.

The next thing you're gonna need to do is make your mark of where your letters are gonna go.

So let's say I want my B here, I'm gonna put the B, I'm gonna put the M here, I already have an A, I'm gonna put the G here, and then the L down here, best for last.

I'm gonna make my A little larger so you can see it.

So now that I have my letters and my holes, I can actually put my flowers in them and match them up.

So let's see, I'm gonna tilt it up a little so you can see it and here are my flowers that I've made that are still drying.

So this is the A, do you see the A?

A is right here, that's right.

So then you're gonna stick the flower in the garden, match up your A.

How about the B?

Is it on top or on the bottom?

On top, lemme climb up there, get the B in there.

Next is the L, ooh, at the bottom.

That's right, next to the A, how about the M?

The M is above the L right here, so notice I'm bringing in those preposition words and the last one is G right in the center.

So you can see how it makes a garden at the end.

I'm gonna teach you really quickly or show you how to fancy up your garden if you want, you can add some flowers or some leaves to your flowers.

So I have some green paper, I'm gonna put this to the side right here and show you green paper that I'm gonna make some leaves with and we'll add some leaves because it's always more fun to play with things if they're fancy, just like the school in our story, all of those extra things just makes it extra fun to be there.

There's my leaf and you can go through and add, whoop, droopy leaf.

We learned that word yesterday or the day before, droopy leaf.

See, there's my leaf, you can add more leaves.

Now I wanted to show you how to make this look like less of a box and more like some grass.

So I'm gonna measure around and then say, about right here, then I'm gonna make a straight line cut.

You're wanna gonna measure how long this box is.

Then you're gonna wanna make a cut right down where you kinda made that fold, and then, you're gonna wanna cut across because you don't want your grass to be so tall that it covers the flowers, but you don't want it to be so short that it doesn't cover the box and make a strip of paper or green long like this and then we're gonna make some grass.

So there's my strip right there, time to make some grass.

Now has anyone ever show you how to grass out of paper?

Take your strip of paper, get your scissor and chomp down like this and you go all kinds of directions to make triangles.

Now, the only thing you don't wanna do is go right to the bottom.

So you're gonna keep going, I'm gonna do this kinda quickly so you can see what it looks like at the end, all the way down, but not all, not to the very bottom, just kind of, until it just touches there.

Keep going, you can use this for everything that has grass in it that you wanna make.

Then I'm gonna take my glue, put it on there and time to add our grass to our flower alphabet, here we go.

A little more at the bottom here, there it is.

Now to make your grass look extra, extra realistic, you're gonna wanna curl it up.

Now, if you have a pen or something that you'd like to use, you can just kinda go through and curl it like this and then it kinda makes your grass look like it's coming out like this, a pencil works really well.

I'm gonna fold that last one and then show you, here it is our flower letter garden that you can use to match your letters and learn your letter sounds.

So I hope that you give this a try.

Right now I'm gonna show you one book that we're not going to get to read this week, but I wanted to call it out out because it's a good one.

When you get to school and you're four or five years old, it's a big deal to learn to not interrupt and this is a great book for teaching students to not interrupt the teacher when it's the teacher's turn or another student's turn, it's called "Interrupting Chicken."

And as the title says, this chicken does not know how to wait his turn out, give you a little sneak peek.

There's the chicken being read to and every time the dad tries to read the story, guess what the chicken does?

Interrupts, start saying his own thing, and this makes the dad very, very frustrated.

(laughs) He starts writing his own stories even.

Hard to get through things when someone keeps talking over you.

So I hope that you check out this book at your local library.

I love to read and share fun stories with you.

Looks like it's time for us to say goodbye, so Ms. Lara sends you a big squeeze and a big smooch, (kissing) I remind you to read and play and to use your five senses and your imagination every single day.

We'll see you next time.

Goodbye.

(gentle inspiring music)