Welcome to Spring 2015!

Welcome to the 2015 spring semester at Pirate Pete Preschool! We were so excited to get started this week even if we missed the first day due to snow! Now that we are getting into the swing of things we want to give everyone a taste of what preschool has been like the first few days back.

In the morning, all remembered the Welcome Song, Days of the Week Song and how to do the morning calendar.  Our new preschoolers are learning the system and these songs too and everyone in that group is catching on very quickly and all are doing a great job raising their hand to take a turns to tell us what date today, yesterday, or tomorrow hold on the calendar.  They also tell us the weather outside and what types of clothes Pirate Pete should wear each day.

This month we will be talking about relationships between friends, family and around the world.  In keeping with encouraging children to play with all types of friends we did a few math activities by patterning various boys and girls by color and gender. Then we sorted out the paper people by color and also created our own patterns. 

We were amazed to find how many of our preschoolers are so great at visual math! Many of them were able to tell us if we had three friends and added one more that there would be four friends playing together. We were even more impressed when we had five friends and took two away to hear the preschoolers say there are three friends left! 

These are types of math activities we will continue to do throughout the semester and every preschooler is currently at a different level in each of these areas.  Remember, math needs to be very concrete and visual at this age and just teaching random 2+2 = 4 does not work, the children need to see the amounts to understand the representational math they will use later in grade school.

Our morning math activity was definitely a higher level for our 'to be kindergartners'. The teachers helped them count on their fingers to represent the numbers on their math worksheets. We will be doing various things like this from time to time to allow those children the opportunity to experience a taste of kindergarten math skills so we wanted an initial skill gage for some of them this semester.

Sometimes when people talk about their families or those they care about that person may refer to a "love bug". 

So we decided to have the preschoolers glue together various hearts creating a love bug, of sorts. This heart caterpillar was of each child's own creation. While we strongly recommended the children create patterns with their colored hearts, some simply wanted to put them in various orders.

We played a terrific new matching game inspired by Pinterest that involved the lids from baby wipes and a poster board. Underneath each lid was a picture and the children had to match up pictures of boys and girls. It was just like memory only it is not possible for all the cards to get shuffled.  
The lids kept things exactly where they were and allowed the children to have more success. If you have little ones at home still using baby wipes I highly recommend you save the little plastic tops and you can easily make one of these with a piece of poster board from Hobby Lobby or Michaels for about a dollar. It was a lot of fun and the children enjoyed it: we will definitely do it again!

Before making Alka-Seltzer volcanoes in water bottles at the tables together, some teachers demonstrated how to make the Alka-Seltzer water volcanoes at the circle. The children enjoyed coming up in front of the entire class to help drop the pieces of Alka-Seltzer in or stir the water around.

We then put Alka-Seltzer tablets to work this week again and combined vegetable oil and water in a water bottle along with a little bit of food coloring for added sparkle. Once you drop an Alka-Seltzer tablet into the water bottle it almost 'burps' bubbles into the vegetable oil. We added a bit of glitter so it was easier to see the bubbles come up as they popped.

One of the other science experiments we did this week was the magic of pepper. We talked about pepper being like friends all hanging out in a pan together. When someone comes along and takes a toy away or refuses to share or pushes someone in the group we watch the pepper spread out and go away from that 'soapy finger' who was not being very nice.  (This really is a great science experiment not only to talk about friendship but also to talk about dirt being afraid of soap during our hygiene unit.)  

Back to the friend scenario we then talked about ways someone could become friends with someone or a way we can keep our friends. The preschoolers offered information like sharing toys and taking turns and giving hugs; we then added a bit of sweet sugar to the pan and watched the pepper join back up again!  

This is such a great visual for the children to see what happens when someone is hurtful in school as opposed to someone being 'sweet' to people in school.

As we talked about friendships, another science experiment done in the afternoon was one with a black light. We talked about Peter Pan's best friend Tinker-bell and how she likes to glow-in-the-dark. Then in a jar (just like in the story of Peter Pan) we squeezed the ink from various highlighters. 

We turned out the lights and held up the black light to the jars; the children were impressed to see which jars glowed and which did not.  (In case you were wondering, you need a yellow highlighter in order to glow.) 

The preschoolers had terrific explanations for why they thought the blue or orange highlighter colors were not lighting up in the jars. This is a very simple activity you can do at home if you have a black light keychain rand if not, you can pick up one from a local general store.

Always wanting to incorporate more science activities in school, we made bubbles with our friends out of water, dish soap and we added a little bit of sparkle for good measure. The children practiced blowing through straws creating air on their hands first and then placed the straws in the water to blow bubbles. 

We have learned over the years never to give a child a straw and tell him or her to blow bubbles, (they will end up trying to drink up the water instead out of habit).  So, we have them practice blowing air through the straw first.  (We apologize if anyone tries to blow bubbles out of their milk now at lunch in the coming weeks, ha.)

The children were so excited with this activity that it actually took twice as long as we thought it would when we planned it. However, we always enjoy seeing the children so excited about discovering something new!

Pets are also members of many of our preschool families. So we have been talking about them as well this week. One of the teachers read her favorite Disney book, 101 Dalmatians. Then, the preschoolers were given dog bones to cut out and go around the room with the teachers to measure things. 

Measuring with one of the dog bones is just as important as measuring something with a ruler. It teaches the concept of measurement not necessarily the reading of a ruler. This is one of the building blocks for learning measurement in school. 

After the children measured items around the room with their teachers they were given strips of paper to cut out animal ears and make a headband for either a dog or a cat. Once the children made their headbands with the ears they chose to create, they were able to go around the room acting like a dog or cat.

Another activity we did with our pet time was a science experiment comparing and contrasting the various types of pet food. 

The children were given baggies with dog, cat, fish, guinnea pig, etc. food and the children were asked to guess what types of animals these foods would feed. Then we smelled them and touched them and talked about how they were different and why different animals need it different types of food.

We are still working on letter of the day this semester in preschool starting back at the letter 'Aa'. The morning preschoolers are going to be remembering these letters but the afternoon preschoolers are being exposed to them for the first time.  

Typically, we will do one letter a day throughout the semester and once we finish the alphabet, we will work on numbers 1 through 10 and then a variety of shapes.  After looking at pictures that start with the letter of the day, we practice the phonics that go with each photo as a large group.  

Because of our snow day on Monday, we covered letters 'Aa' and 'Bb' on Wednesday this week and Friday we covered letter 'Cc'.

The teacher then will demonstrate how to draw both and upper and lower case version of that letter and then any child who's name starts with that letter is able to come up to the white board and draw one for the class too.  

Once that is completed, then all the children go to the tables to draw the letter of the day on the given worksheet.  Feel free to check these and ask your student to draw another one for you at home to check for understanding and have a first hand look at your child's ability at this point in the semester.

Some of you may find your preschooler is still bringing home a letter of the day worksheet with 'just scribbles' on it. Please know it is developmentally appropriate for three and some for-year-olds to be at this particular stage of writing.  The important thing is the more they practice scribbling, the sooner they will be able to write actual letters. We work with them each day on holding a crayon correctly as well as trying to follow a line on a page.  We promise you: it will get better.

Even though we have been talking about who lives in each preschooler's home we also talked about animals and their homes to help the children with a little activity along the lines of fine motor skill development.  

The preschoolers were instructed to draw a line from an animal to his or her home on the farm.  This type of activity also helps the children become better writers as it uses the same small muscle groups in their hands as writing letters.

After talking so much about how to make friends, the afternoon preschoolers made friendship bracelets using pipe cleaners and small cut up pieces of straws. Some children chose to create patterns while others just wanted to accomplish getting the straw pieces onto the pipe cleaners. This is a great fine motor skills activity and really helps with hand-eye coordination.

In keeping with fine motor skill development, the afternoon preschoolers were given a strip of paper where they could draw out the members of their families. Many of the preschoolers did a great job practicing how to draw stick people in order to represent the members of their family. (Some chose to throw a cat or dog on the page as well.)

Morning classes were given a paper house and stick figure images to select the members of their family who live in their house with them. Some preschoolers remembered all of their siblings while others remembered all of their pets. The children and teachers had great conversations about who they live with and how they are similar as well as different.

The focus this month is relationships and one of the relationship forms we talked about is making friends from people around the world.  We wanted to focus on the differences we all have to share with one another and how we can learn from each other. So one of the teachers put together some sensory bins showcasing various items from different continents.  We had 'snow', sand, various types of food and animals and the children rotated to each table to play and learn about what they found in each bin.  We read the story, The Colors of Us by Karen Katz; a personal favorite of mine with my children which looks at the beauty of our communities and how amazing it is that we can all look so different and be so much alike.

For a pre-writing skill in the morning, the children then traced the outline of the continents on a map they were given. Some children chose to just trace on the dotted lines while others wanted to color in their maps. This helped to get conversation started about names of continents from around the world. And some even remembered the word 'continents!'

While we were talking about places around the world, we asked the morning preschoolers if they remembered our discussion about polar bears from last semester. Some of the children remembered that polar bears have extra layers of fur and fat to keep them warm in the arctic wind. 

We then had the children touch cold water with their bare hand and then put on a plastic glove and then after that wrap the hand and plastic. This helped the children experience the various layering and how we stay warm in the winter (layers). We talked about how many of us are wearing coats and hats and gloves and boots in the cold the season. It reminded all of us of how important it is to dress warm this time of year. 

We talked about how just like every tree is different so is every family tree and some of them have more leaves than others. This was again a great way for her teachers and preschoolers to get to know more about each other.  Each hand represented a member of the child's family and some were able to name them for teachers to write on the hands before placing them in the trees.

This week we also talked about how fun it is to play games with your friends and family and one of the teachers brought in a game she enjoyed playing with her sisters when she was growing up. The preschoolers enjoyed playing Elafun and trying to catch the butterflies that came out of the elephant's trunk.

The afternoon preschoolers enjoyed learning the different games we have on hand in the preschool to play during free play. The teachers set out various games and activities and allow the children to choose which one they wanted to try out first.

Some of the children chose to play with the many plastic animals we have in preschool. You will find these used a lot throughout the semester and they are available to the children throughout the day during free play. Some children like to categorize them while others choose their favorites and enjoy using their imaginations. However a child chooses to play with these animals it is great for vocabulary development as well as getting to know how their mind works.

Our afternoon preschoolers discovered the magnifying glasses for the first time this week and it was a terrific science center for them to share and look at the various plants and other small animals we have in cased.  With activities like this it's not just about the science behind the magnifying glass and the object they are looking at, it is also about taking turns and sharing our belongings with our friends. This is why this lesson this done early in the semester to encourage proper social skills for school.

Many of our preschoolers are enjoying being in school this first week back; we are so excited to have them in our program and love getting to know them and finding out which areas of our room they enjoy the most during free choice time.

Some children enjoy playing alone (solitary play) while others like to play near children (parallel play). The end goal by the time they leave preschool is to get them to enjoy cooperative play which is the highest form of play because it involves the most amount of compromise. Typically kindergartners would be in this stage so if we can get our five-year-olds to play cooperatively with one another (not just teachers) we have done our social developmental job.

One of the books we read on Wednesday was about when a baby enters a family. The story talks about the importance of helping out people at home when the baby arrives from the hospital as well as how great it can be to help take care of someone in need. It was a great way to start off this week!

In focusing on friends, another book we read this week was about the character Arthur playing soccer. In this book the children heard about people taking turns and resolving conflict. There were wonderful life skills to learn and these are some of the things we will be focusing on throughout not only the month but the entire semester.

The preschool week ended with some great stories about parents and friends and the importance of relationships. This really has been a terrific start to the semester all around and I know we are going to have a great rest of the year.  This month's topic about relationships is the perfect start to meeting new preschoolers and teachers and everyone is doing wonderfully!

What's Coming Up?

• We have our first full week of school this week complete with a Valentine's Day Valentine exchange on Friday.  Please remember to label the valentine with your child's name and then address it to "My Friend".  If you are planning on having your child help you by writing his/her name, be sure to pace yourself.  Remember a person's attention span is typically only their age and it often takes some children a while to write their name.  A few valentines at a time each day leading up to Friday would be best.
• Next week we will only have one day of preschool due to President's Day on Monday and the State Gymnastics Meet that is held at Palatine High School each year.  If you are looking for something fun to do with the kiddos, it is a great day to see some amazing talent!
• Please remember to check the calendar located on this page, our website and in this link.  A paper copy will be going home in cubbies this week for your refrigerator doors but I know some people enjoy syncing a Google Calendar to their phones.