Our PreSchool Blog

We had so much fun celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in the Preschool Classroom!  We did a fun art activity where we learned about the order of colors in the rainbow and painted using Q-tips!

A Leprechaun snuck onto our playground and hid gold EVERYWHERE! We got to take a pot and find some gold coins that he left!

For snack, we made rainbows out of fruit loops and marshmallows.  They were so delicious!

To practice number order, we ordered our shamrocks from 1 to 10!

Yesterday we had a science visit from the Cincinnati Museum Center!  We got to learn all about insects and explore some fun activities as well as see and touch some very large Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches!

Each student got a bag of insect parts and we learned the names of the body parts and put our insects together!

We got to wear some silly glasses that made us look like bugs and allowed us to see a little like an insect would!

We got to explore with magnifying glasses and see some real insects that have been preserved as well as look at lots of pictures of different insects.

We even got to see and some of us even wanted to touch the Madagascar Hissing Cockroach! He was so big!

To explore more ways to paint, we got to paint with ice cubes last week!  It was a very fun activity and I think that quite a few of our students would have sat and done it all morning!

One of our preschool math goals this month was sorting.  We have been sorting all sorts of things; hearts by size, colors, shapes, and for this activity, we sorted letters.  All letters are made up of lines.  Some have straight lines like A, L and T.  Some letters like O and S have curvy lines.  And some letters use both kinds of lines such as B, D, and R.  There were a lot more letters that used both kinds of lines we discovered!  We looked at each of our letters and decided which category they all fit into and sorted them that way!

One of our art exploration activities this month was to paint on foil.  We discovered that it made the colors very bright and we had such a fun time with this activity!

Thanks for celebrating Valentine’s Day with us!

Teaching young children how to correctly grip a pencil can be a tricky task.  There are developmental stages with which one goes through when using writing utensils such as pencils, crayons, and markers and you may be seeing your child go through these stages this year!  The “Fisted Grip” is very typical early in the preschool school year and we rarely see this in our students at this point in the year.  That then moves into a finger grip which is still common through the winter months.  The early version of this is having a light finger grip at the top of the utensil.

With this, it is very hard to control the writing utensil and makes the children tired very quickly while writing.   Whenever we see this, we do our best to support the children by moving their hand down on the utensil and reminding them to rest the side of their hand on the table as they write.  Eventually this will become second nature to them!

One of the curriculum goals for preschool is to work towards what we call a tripod grip.  A tripod grip is where you use three fingers; your thumb, pointer, and middle finger to grip the writing tool.

This is considered the ideal grip with which you can move your hand accurately and efficiently.  Another piece to this grip is that your hand is low on the pencil and that it also rests on the table.  This is the best way to give your hand the most strength and allows you to write for extended period of time using straight lines instead of getting tired and having very light, squiggly lines.

We are beginning to see lots of low handed finger grips and even the tripod grips and we are so excited for this growth in your children!  You will see a lot of handwriting activities coming home with your children, as well as fine motor and hand strengthening activities posted on the blog as these are all skills that we use to work on this pencil grip and handwriting.  If they aren’t already, you will see your child beginning to write the letters in their name and our goal is for them to write their name independently by the end of the school year!!  They are getting ready to be able to write words and eventually even short sentences when they head to KPrep next year!

We have been working very hard on naming letters and the sounds they make!  For a Get Up and Move activity, we decided to go on a letter hunt.  Our letters were hidden all over the classroom and we had to go hunt them all down!  Once they were found, we named them and said the sound they make.