Our PreSchool Blog

Even though our snow has melted, that doesn’t keep us from building our own snowman!  Today, we made paper mache snowmen.  Mixing equal parts water and flour, the children got ooey gooey by slathering our balloon snowmen with pasty newspaper.  This two-part project has a ways to go.  Next Thursday, we will get to decorate the snowmen by getting ooey gooey again when making them white (shaving cream anyone?!), and topping them off with their proper decorations.  We can’t wait to to see the finished product!

New centers means new ways to learn our letters, letter sounds, practice our numbers, one-to-one correspondence, patterning and shapes.  Today, the children learned how to play the new games and activities that are in our centers.  They were all eager to try something new!

Getting back into the swing of things means reviewing old routines and practicing procedures.  For our small groups, the boys and girls learned new games and activities that are available to them in our centers.  Teaching them how the activities and games work ensures that the children are playing the game/activity the correctly, ultimately gaining the educational purpose it is designed for.  A new month means new centers, which means new ways to learn!

Welcome back!!  It was great to see everyone’s smiling face back in action today!  To start the new year off, we introduce new center activities, along with a new January country: Greenland.  With a cold climate and lots of white to see,  the children have lots of opportunity to explore activities with letters, numbers and shapes that represent snow and ice.  In Ms. Leslie’s small group, we played “Flurries or Snowstorm?”  The children chose a number, then put the corresponding “snowflakes” onto our winter scene.  In Ms. Lori’s small group, she showed the children several ways to build a snowman: rolling balls using playdoh, stacking different sized circles, and tracing a snowman.  In Ms. Courtney’s small group, the children used “snow” to trace out the letters V, W and X.  We had a snowtastic day!

It’s hard to believe we are on holiday break!!  What better way to usher in the holidays than having a party?!  Thank you to all of you who were able to make it this morning.  The children always enjoy spending time with you while they are in action!  Thank you for sharing your children with us.  We truly enjoy spending our days teaching, learning and growing with them.  We wish you all a safe and very happy holiday.  We look forward to seeing everyone in 2011!

Flour is an important ingredient when it comes to baking cookies.  Today, we found a different use for it: practicing our letters!  As we focused on the letters K, L and U, the children got those fingertips moving to create the letters in the flour.  How many times can they write the letter?  Believe me, they would do this all day long if they could!  This multi-sensory activity definitely made for a memorable experience.

During the holidays, there is a big need for scissors….mostly wrapping all those presents!  Today the children practiced their scissor skills by cutting fringe for their place mats.  Starting with scissor safety, the boys and girls used their fine motor skills to make one cut snips create fringe to glue to the end of the place mat.  The children were so proud of how successful they were with all of their snips!

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!

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.

Sparkles anyone?!  Activities with sequins, or anything sparkly for that matter, are always exciting.  Digging through to find the exact color and shape that you want is excellent fine motor practice.  Using the tips of their fingers, each child grasped and place sequins to trace his/her name.  As we outlined the names in glue, the children were also able to practice tracing their names. Each child was very focused as they paid close attention to their sequin details!