Our PreSchool Blog

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!

For the second half of February, keeping our monthly objectives in mind, we have been learning about outer space! We’ve read the book How to Catch a Star and have been learning about stars, planets, and space.

In one of our activities we used our imaginations in our learning to pretend that our different colored balls were “planets” from outer space going into a black hole–but look out! If you don’t sort the ball into the color that it matches, the black holes will “spit them out”!

Our discovery bins are space-themed, with rockets, aliens, stars, astronauts, and other sensory objects that the toddlers really enjoy to free play with.

We made our own galaxy! Our students learned to use the sides of paperless crayons to pinch between their fingers and rub along the paper, for a new way to color! They also loved adding star stickers to make it look like the night sky.

And what could be better than outer spaced themed snacks? 🙂

Thank you all for coming to our classroom to celebrate Valentine’s Day with us! We hope you enjoyed being there, as much as we loved having you all!

Thanks for celebrating Valentine’s Day with us!

What fun we had at our class Valentine’s Day party today!

Games, treats, a photo booth and music with Ms. Joanie! What could be better?

The month of February is all about the love. Our shape of the month (heart) and color of the month (pink) can be seen all around our classroom, and in the activities our toddler friends have been working on each day. We’ve even been practicing our gentle hugs to share with our friends. We are all feeling the love, and we can’t wait to celebrate Valentine’s Day with the toddler families on Thursday and Friday!

Some of our friends, checking out all of the snow outside 🙂

Some heart-shaped fun, with matching and counting!

We even played a Valentine version of “Duck, Duck, Goose”, saying “Heart, Heart, Valentine”, instead! This really helps them with listening skills, following directions, and taking turns. They also have a blast doing it!

What a sweet moment between two of our friends 🙂 ….

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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!