St. Patrick's Day

This week we spent a lot of time looking for leprechauns and learning about rainbows as the children heard tales about pots of gold.  We went on many leprechaun hunts both physically in the room, around the school and even on iPads!

As we studied the colors in rainbows and practiced identifying colors and mixing them to make other colors we also learned the color green is the favorite color of the little fellows who live at the end of the rainbow!  

We built some rainbows in the afternoon with vinegar, water colored paint and baking soda.  The best part of the experiment is that you can do it over and over again with just those three supplies!  

We wrote our names, drew other letters and numbers and shapes in green colored sand before adding it to our sensory bin to continuously play in it throughout our free play time.

Then we used Lucky Charms to practice finding, sorting, counting and graphing the marshmallows in the box for some mathematic fun.  The will power in the room was amazing as no one ate any marshmallows during these activities!

We do a lot of process and product art in preschool and to show you the differences between the two we will compare these two art projects for you.  Process art is when we pulled out all sorts of craft materials that were green and allowed the children to use them any way they wanted to decorate the green shamrocks as we learned about their luck!  

Product art is when we reviewed a rainbow and what it looked like then instructed the children to paint a rainbow and add clouds to the bottom of them.  This was a project where everyone was instructed to make the same thing and the teacher evaluated the children's ability to follow instructions, not creativity.  You will often see both types of projects come home and so we thought we would take a moment to share the concepts the children are learning behind both styles of art.

To work on some fine motor skills we built shamrock necklaces of gold using golden Cheerios cereal.  If you have this cereal at home and some string, you have instant fine motor skills activities.  Remember, these skills promote the development of the fingers which impacts writing and cutting skills later.

For some scientific fun this week we built a rainbow in a jar as we discussed density and which items are heavier or lighter than others as we dyed them the colors of the rainbow and poured them into a jar.  Then, we took water colored paint and had a celery race to see which piece of celery would drink the colored water the fastest.  This was a very exciting experiment as the children asked to check the celery before they started every other activity of that day.

There were a few tricky little leprechauns in our classroom this week, some of them flipped our room around and others hid their gold in piles of goo or all around the room!  They sure were some trouble making little creatures and were mysterious as they moved around the room when no one was looking then turned to stone as soon as someone spotted them!  

In fact, to add to the craziness those leprechauns bring in the morning the 'leprechaun' turned out the lights (most of Palatine was apparently out of power for a few minutes in fact) during snack time so we showed 'the leprechaun' he couldn't trick us and we had snack by cell phone candle light!  


As the children talked to their teachers about how tricky that leprechaun is for turning out the lights, they came up with the idea to build some traps and catch him for good so he couldn't cause any more trouble and just then, the lights came back on...we are pretty sure we scared him into turning them back on for us! Ha! 

We really had an awesome time in preschool this week acting silly with all the fun this holiday brings, we hope the children enjoyed it all as much as we did!

What's Coming Up?

• We are now on spring break and will come back to preschool on Wednesday, March 30th.
  
• The two day week back will be all about transportation and we have many things in store we hope the children will play at home too!
  
• We still have two spots available for fall preschool, if you know of anyone interested in our program, feel free to share our contact information.