Our PreSchool Blog

Friends are vital to Preschool & Pre-Kindergarten children’s healthy development. Research has found that children who lack friends can suffer from emotional and mental difficulties later in life. Friendships provide children with more than just fun playmates. Friendships help children develop emotionally and morally. In interacting with friends, children learn a lot of social skills, such as how to communicate, cooperate, and solve problems. They practice controlling their emotions and responding to the emotions of others. They develop the ability to think through and negotiate different situations that arise in their relationships. Having friends even affects children’s school performance. Children tend to have better attitudes about school and learning when they have friends to share it with.

We played a building game on Thursday to continue our math unit in comparing sets.  We rolled the dice, built our towers then compared our tower with our friends’ towers.  Who had more blocks in their tower?  Who had fewer?  Who had an equal amount of blocks in their towers?  Super easy game to do at home on a snowy day…all you need are some blocks and one die!

Our preschoolers turned our classroom into Santa’s Workshop today as we turned red licorice and white yarn into a candy cane!  This is no ordinary candy cane….it’s a number nine candy cane!  In order to make this yummy creation, the children had to follow step-by-step directions, use their fine motor skills to twist, and use number recognition to create the number nine.  It was a quite a treat to work on so many skills in one fun activity!

Pencils and crayons are not the only materials we use for pre-writing skills. The children were given M&Ms to work on fine motor skills by outlining the first letter of their name.

We created our own individual M&M graphs today to compare the quantities of different groups of colors in a bag of M&M’s.  They REALLY enjoyed this activity and I was VERY surprised at how many kids did NOT want to eat them at the end of, but rather take them home to repeat the activity at home.  TOO CUTE

We wrote our friends’ names on mirrors today to continue our writing conventions unit of study.  We focused on formation and orientation.  They really enjoyed showing off their accomplishments to their friends…

We explored the concept of sinking and floating today in preschool.  We made our predictions and recorded them on a chart, then, tested our predictions first hand.  We then recorded our findings on a new graph to compare what we predicted against our findings.

Our second focus this month is on writing conventions including formation and orientation.  We began, of course, with the letter Gg!

We continued our math study in small groups through the creation of a Gingerbread Graph.  We took one big bite of a delicious gingergread cookie and recorded where we took our first bite on a class graph.  We then compared each column by identifying which location had the most names and the least names.  Looks like the leg was the winner!

We started a new math unit this week…Comparing Quantities of Sets.  We will be using a variety of graphs to explore what the words more, fewer, and equal mean.  We began our study at group time with a graph about which drink we wanted for snack.