This week, we started our Fairy Tales unit by reading different versions of The Three Little Pigs! On Monday, we read an original version of the story. We also learned new Morning Meeting songs with sign language! I recently purchased the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness curriculum which is a research-based curriculum that helps preschool-aged children develop pre-reading skills in developmentally appropriate ways. We started using it on Monday and the children love it!
On Tuesday, we spent the morning in the forest classroom! It was cold outside (in the upper twenties), but that didn’t bother us! We read another original version of the Three Little Pigs, and then children worked together or independently to build a house for a little toy pig out of materials in the forest! There were 2 criteria for the house: it had to protect the pig from the weather (specifically snow), and it had to withstand a huff and a puff from the “Big Bad Wolf” (me). The students came up with very inventive ideas and used critical thinking skills to build a house that would fit the criteria. Once all of the houses were built, we all walked around to each house and put the pig inside of it. First, I sprinkled snow on top of the house to see if the pig stayed dry, and then I blew on the house (with help from the students) to see if it would fall over. Every single house passed both tests! After our Three Little Pigs STEM activity, we went on a hike on the trail to look for tracks. We saw a lot of deer tracks!
On Wednesday, we read an original version of The Three Little Pigs that ended differently than the other versions that we had read. We compared and contrasted the two stories. Some students used the puppets in the reading area to re-tell the story with their friends! A few students also enjoyed dictating very silly stories for me to write down.
On Thursday, we read “The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig,” a silly story that switches the characters of The Three Little Pigs. Students noticed many similarities and differences between this story and the original story. Many students had fun with math on Thursday! Some worked hard on the hundreds board, some worked on their spatial reasoning skills with puzzles, and others used the number spots to hop on and count.
On Friday, we read “The True a Story of the Three Pigs,” another silly version of The Three Little Pigs that is told from the Wolf’s perspective. We talked about what perspective means and how it changed the story.
Samuel Morey Preschool Blog 