The first time I saw a light table was at a Reggio Emilia inspiried preschool in New York City. Every classroom that we visited had one and I began to wonder what they were all about. After researching the various ways these could benefit preschool age children in their learning process, we decided to get one for our own classroom.
Our light table allows children to experience everyday objects in a whole new way. In the coming months we will be using the light table for a multitude of activities as well as free choice play with ever changing manipulatives. Here are some of the activities that may take place at our light table this year: building our names and sight words with special translucent letter tiles, exploring and creating colors with color paddles, using various stencils, using the light table to trace our letters and names, manipulating shapes to become more aware of spacial relationships through the use of translucent geometric pieces while discovering the basics of geometry, viewing x-rays of various types of animals and shells, and finger painting on parchment paper (just to name a few). These should be great experiences for your children and ones that they will not soon forget.
As we complete our unit on letter recognition and sound review this month we are focusing on matching lowercase letters to pictures with corresponding initial sounds. The ability to understand the structure of spoken language plays a crucial part in reading success now and in the future. It is very important for children to automatically be able to manipulate sounds in words (phonemic awareness) so that comprehension is the focus of reading rather than decoding unknown words. We develop phonemic awareness (ability to manipulate sounds in words) through a variety of consistent and age appropriate activities in which children are asked to recognize and manipulate sounds.
We counted dots on dice to decide how many leaves to put on our fall tree.
Today in the Early 3’s class, we made “H” is for “Hands.” We painted our hand prints over the letter “H” written in painter’s tape. I loved how they turned out!! We also practiced our scooping skills by scooping marbles out of rice and putting them into cups/bowls. We worked on identifying our letters by having children come up one at a time and point to the letter they were asked to find. {We definitely still need to work on our letter recognition.} For snack today, the children had to find their name (written on the butcher paper covering the table) and sit at the seat when they found their name. This was an activity to help them with their name recognition…and they absolutely loved it. Before they could get up from snack, they had to try tracing their names with a crayon of a different color other than the color it was written in. I was amazed by how many children could follow the letters in their name. During whole group, we talked about using our imagination and read the story, “It Looked Like Spilt Milk.” I passed around a colorful box and had the children shake it, then use their imaginations to guess what was inside. Needless to say, the children thoroughly enjoyed this activity!! Overall, a fantastic start to our week here at Creative Tots! See you on Wednesday!!
{Miss Sarah}
Cutting accurately with scissors is a skill we sometimes take for granted. Cutting requires the coordination of many skills including fine motor coordination, bilateral coordination, and eye-hand coordination. Like many other skills, scissor skills develop sequentially and require appropriate instruction and practice to develop fully. You will find scissor practice pages here that you can work on with your child at home.
Creative Tots has specialized in the private education of both toddlers and preschool age children for over 15 years. We began in the heart of Madeira and now also have a new Mason location. We are specifically designed to focus on early childhood development for children ages 18 months to 5 years.
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