Sports Week

This week sparked our Star of the Week program with Pirate Pete Preschool again this semester.  The children in the morning and afternoon programs presented their posters telling the class about themselves.  Each week we will once again have a preschooler or two take the spotlight to show us the posters they worked on the weekend before about themselves.  This is a great time for them to share more about their lives not only with the teachers but with their friends and we love hearing them share!

Let's get moving!  This week we learned about all of the different sports that people play.  The children were great at identifying the different balls that we use to play these sports.  Soccer balls, basketballs, and baseballs were all over the preschool this week!  

We learned about the Olympics and the five special rings.  Using blue, black, red, yellow, and green beads, the preschoolers had the opportunity to craft their own Olympic bracelets!  

We read many books this week about sportsmanship and learning about different sports as well as what it means to be on the team. 

We also sang songs new and old to our preschool program. The morning children sang, "The Cool Bear Hunt," song by Dr. Jean and we are now teaching it to the afternoon children as well. To get ourselves in shape along with the exercising we did this week, we also sang, "Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes," a few times to work on movement. 

We played a dice game where the children rolled a giant die and had to perform the exercise shown on the die to 'warm up' for the many sporting activities we played this week. We did lunges and stretches even push-ups, sit ups and butterfly stretches. The children had a great time coming up with other exercises they've seen their parents do at home to add to the dice. 

This week we spent a lot of time talking about the various equipment and the sizes and types of balls used in various sporting games. Since many are of the circle shape, we used paper plates a lot this week to create soccer, baseball, and basketballs with materials provided by the teachers.

After creating balls out of paper plates, we also passed out paintbrushes and paper for the children to practice making the circle shape with paint brushes on paper to create tennis balls, basketball, soccer balls, volleyballs, etc. It was interesting to see them use the paintbrushes to create various circle shapes of styles and colors and explain their images to their teachers.

One of our math activities this week involved children sticking sport balls a piece of paper and writing down how many of each type of ball they put on their paper. The goal of this activity is for the children to recognize the number and associate that number with the correct amount of stickers on the paper. 

We played a variety of games on the iPads this week that were all sports related. Sometimes it would be soccer on the iPad or basketball as well as search and find looking for various types of balls used in a variety of sporting events. All of these activities are supplemental to what we are working on in school to reiterate the theme of the week. 

Afternoon children were able to get some gym time in as we took a field trip to the north shelf of our gymnasium. We set up soccer nets and allowed the children to play soccer on a much larger scale than what we have done in the classroom. Since we had this huge space, we also did a lot of running and exercises to get their heart rates up and exercise that day. 

If we were not able to get gym space, we still played sports in our preschool ground as well. We pushed the tables aside and using our large circle time areas we played soccer, did balance beams, play basketball, and more!

The afternoon's math activity involved baseball bats and baseballs. Each child's baseball bat had a number written on it and (similar to the morning's math activity) they needed to place the correct number of baseballs onto the paper with the bat that match the number they were given. For example if a child's bat said four and they should have glued four baseballs onto their paper along with their bat. 

Using some tennis balls, we cut them open and turned them into tennis ball frogs. The children rolled a dice and had to count the number on the dice then fed the tennis ball frog that number of beads. This worked on small motor skills as the children tried to squeeze the ball to open the frog mouth and inserted the small beads. They had a lot of fun laughing at how full their tennis ball frogs must be once they had fed all the beads to them. 

Our afternoon reading activity on Friday gave the children many letters which allowed them to match words associated with sports on paper with matching the number of letters with the amount of empty squares on their paper.

The morning children ended the week playing basketball and baseball with a baseball diamond at the circle rug.  While some kids were playing these two sports, others were at the tables playing a math game with dice.  Dice are often used in kindergarten for addition games and we are using them to count out the dots on the dice to begin steps toward this process.  

The children would roll the dice then count the black dots and color in the baseball with the number that matched that amount.  The first child to color all his/her baseballs won!

We did some sink and float activities in the preschool with various balls this week in both the morning and afternoon sessions.  We learned heavy items sink and hollow items with air float.  

We had some race car sporting activity for science in the morning this week too as the children guessed then tried out which race courses (straight lanes, wavy lanes, etc) would take a longer or shorter amount of time.

The afternoon children made jerseys out of garbage bags on Friday to play sports in the classroom as well.  They were instructed about safety with the plastic bags and played with a team atmosphere as we read about earlier in the week.

Our last science experiment of the week was the constructing of our own bouncing balls.  The children were given foil, plastic wrap, rubber bands and play dough and were asked to create balls out of them.  Then, we tested the bounciness of the balls all together at the front of the room and learned the rubber band balls were the ones that bounced the most!

What's Coming Up?

Pirate Pete Preschool registration for Fall 2016 will start tomorrow (Monday) morning!  The registration paperwork will be emailed and mailed out to all current preschoolers and anyone on the mailing list in the morning and may be turned in either at drop off or pick up of current preschoolers or dropped off in the Palatine High School main office along with tuition checks and any other paperwork necessary if you are not a current preschooler.

We will be focusing in the arts this coming week in preschool as well.  This means we will be talking about not only painting, drawing and sculpture but also music, plays and stories through literature.

The Palatine High School choir concert will be next Friday night (March 11th) and will tie in nicely to this coming week's theme.  The concerts are always amazing and you are welcome to attend!  See the Palatine High School Webpage for more details.