Our PreSchool Blog

The boys and girls were singing twinkle twinkle little star all day today! We counted the points on a star, found different color stars on the floor and of course sang some star songs!

Today the boys and girls had a chance to get a little messy! Our discovery tubs were filled with shaving cream,red paint, peppermint and candy canes. The children were able to swirl and mix the red paint to make their own candy cane mix! It sure did make the room smell good!

Phonics involves the relationship between sounds and their spellings. The goal of phonics instruction is to teach students the most common sound-spelling relationships so that they can decode, or sound out, words. This decoding ability is a crucial element in reading success.  The first step in phonics study is to be able to identify the sound(s) each letter can make.   As we begin to “read” our letter Jj books, we are also taking part in correctly orienting books for reading and turning pages one at a time.  Children also begin to demonstrate an understanding that print carries meaning.  All of these are the first steps in the process of early reading.

This month in science, the K-Prep class has been learning about the 5 senses.  They have been able to explore their senses with interactive experiments as well as fun, educational books and videos.

We first explored our sense of smell.  The class was able to smell different jars and make predictions of what they thought each jar smelled like.  The items were revealed at the end of the lesson!  (Cinnamon sticks, Chocolate, lemons, oranges, mint leaves, garlic)

We learned about our taste buds and how different parts of the tongue are able to taste different things (bitter, salty, sweet, sour)!  After completing the below chart, we were able to taste and compare some of these different foods.

We explored our sense of sight by closing our eyes and trying to draw a picture of a flower.  We then opened our eyes to draw the same flower.  We compared our drawings and saw how important it was to have our sense of sight! After this activity we used magnifying glasses and observed celery sticks.  We discussed how an object’s looks can change, and we conducted an experiment!  The students put celery sticks into glasses of water and added food coloring.  They made some predictions of what would happen to the celery.  Over the course of a few days, we saw how an object can change right in front of our eyes!

Before

After

For our sense of hearing, we played a matching game using plastic Easter eggs.  Different objects were placed inside the Easter eggs.  Each egg had one other matching pair in the basket.  The students had to use great listening skills to match each egg with its identical sounding partner.

Our sense of touch was explored through a mystery box sensory lesson!  Each child had a turn to blindly reach into a mystery box and describe what they felt inside.  We came up with some great descriptive words!  They could ultimately guess what they thought was in the mystery box.

After making some very special christmas gifts, the boys and girls had a chance to build a snowman! We used paper cups to build the body, buttons, a hat and orange carrot nose! We might of also sang the song from Frozen while doing art. 🙂