Our PreSchool Blog

In the rainforest, there are lots of animals that use their tails for practical purposes.  One example is the monkey.  Monkey’s swing from tree to tree using their tails.  Today, Miss Krista, our zoo animal expert, introduced us to two animals that have significant uses for their tails.

Meet Angelina: She is a type of bird called a galaf.  She likes to be in trees with bright pink flowers.  She eats seeds, nuts and fruits.  Her tail has two uses: to balance in trees and to help slow her down to land when she is flying.

Meet Cornflower:  He is a blue tongued lizard.  He uses his tongue to smell.  He eats flies, worms, flowers and loves snails!  His tail is used to help him climb rocks.

Love is in the air this week…especially in the form of counting and patterning Hershey Kisses!  Using an ABABAB pattern the children helped create and extend our red-purple-red-purple pattern.  Next, we practiced counting numbers eight through fourteen by picking a number, then counting out the corresponding number of Hershey Kisses.

While introducing the letter T, the boys and girls practiced their counting and letter recognition.  We brainstormed words that begin with T: tooth, toe, ten and tire, just to name a few, then the children came up and found a specific number and assigned it to a letter T.  Practicing our double digit letter recognition proved to an excellent exercise!

With our mitten activity today, the children were eager to not only sort and graph our mittens, but talk about giving the mittens to boys and girls who need them.  With so many mittens, the children did an excellent job of sorting them by color and graphing each one by categories: Does it have a design on it?  Stripes?  Is it a solid color?  After sorting the mittens, we then decided which category had the most, and which has the least.  We then took the category that had the most (the design category) and counted how many there were.  We are so proud of how excited and eager the children were to donate to the children of First Step Home.  A big thank you to all of you who brought in your generous mitten donations and for helping us teach your children such a valuable lesson!

Walking through the door this morning, the children were talking about how they have mittens to give other kids who can’t buy there own.  It is so heartwarming to hear three and four year old talking about the importance of giving to others.  We started our mitten activity by reading The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein.  As we distributed mittens, the boys and girls sorted them by color.  After that, we sorted them into three categories: stripes, solid color and design.  Using an oversized graph, the children were graphing whizzes!  To finish our graph, the children identified the category with the largest amount of mittens (the design category), and ordered the mittens from numbers one to eleven.  We tried on a few different types of mittens, but we all decided it would be best to give to those in need!  Thank you very much for all of your generous donations and for helping us teach your child the importance of giving back.  We had mitten success!

Studying Greenland this month means learning about different animals in the cold, Arctic habitat.  Today, Ms. Krista, and a few of her zoo friends, came to see us!  We learned about how turtles hibernate beneath the ground during the winter.  We also got to see and touch a chinchilla!  Chinchillas live on the top of cold, snowy mountains, and use their incredibly soft, warm fur to keep them cozy from the cold.  We wish these cute little guys could stay with us all month long!

We’ve been reading this wonderful Eric Carle Book during our Arctic theme this month.  The children love the repetitive language and rhythmic text.  By day two they were reading right along with us!  Reading books with rhyme and predictable text helps children begin to understand story structure.  They are able to figure out what is coming next and better understand difficult vocabulary.

We had our first Show and Share today in the Early 3’s!  The children had the opportunity to bring in one item that started with the letter S…

S is for Snoopy!

S is for Snow White

S is for Snake!

S is for Sun!

S is for Snowball

On the first day back we read Polar Bear Polar Bear What Do You Hear? By Bill Martin Jr. The children reenacted the book by playing with different arctic animals.

Because we cannot go outside, we worked on our gross motor skills inside!

Gross Motor skills are important for major body movement such as walking, maintaining balance, coordination, jumping and reaching and throwing.