Food and Nutrition

Our week was cut short with a snow day on Friday but leading up to that we did a lot of exciting activities learning all about food and nutrition.  

After hearing from our Star of the Week on Monday we jumped into our first pre-reading activity with strawberries and the letter S.  The children working on fine motor skills while they cut out strawberries and then glued them on the line used to make an S and practice recognizing the shape of an S and the sound it makes when saying the word strawberry.

 

After we worked on the letter S we sorted fruits into piles by type and then created fruit patterns with them as well.  We counted how many of each type of fruit we had at our table and then talked about which amount was the most and which was the least.

After math we learned about the germs certain foods can place on our teeth and worked on brushing them to remove the germs and keep our teeth clean.  This is always a favorite game to play with the children and the teachers often are asked to keep adding 'germs' so they can keep playing.  

How do we play? We printed large mouths and had them laminated then color on the teeth with dry erase markers.  Then, the children take actual tooth brushes and scrub and scrub until all the marker (germs) are gone.

After snack we worked on sorting fruits and vegetables in groups and hung these in our preschool to remind us this week what foods count in the vegetable group and which ones count in the fruit group.

We learned about the grains group by cutting up real spaghetti in a fun and silly way to improve our cutting skills.  Teachers colored real spaghetti noodles and passed out gloves to wear to hold the noodles in one hand and the scissors in the other hand and cut the noodles smaller and smaller on their plates.  The children couldn't get enough of this and played with the noodles and scissors for a long time.

 We worked on our writing and letters more this week during free play with our white boards and watching the children draw pictures as well as letter and shapes and numbers.  All of these work the same parts of the hand so they all help to build these skills.

After story time we worked more on letter recognition by cutting out letters on one page and finding their match to glue them down on another page; spelling words.  Some of the children can get all of the words done while others make it through one or so.  This is an example of differentiation.  Different children have different interests and skill sets in cutting, gluing as well as letter recognition.  With activities like this each child is able to work on different skills to suit their individual developmental needs.

Sometimes we have time to do activities like this with differentiation and other times activities are more suited to have everyone do the same thing at the same time.  We watched a teacher demonstrate how to make ice cream and then headed to the tables to recreate that experiment in order to make our own ice cream in groups at the tables.  

We added ingredients and shook them in baggies, taking turns at the tables to give our arms a break from the shaking and watched the liquid thicken.  

 After trying our science experiment we moved around a while and got some exercise as we talked about the balance between healthy foods and exercise too.

Once we were done with our workouts we made some math pies.  We got pie crusts with numbers written on them and added colored pom pons (berries) to make fruit pies.  Some children had green pom pons to make lime pies while others had yellow for lemon and red or pink for strawberry.  Lots of imagination with this short math game!

 Before heading home on Wednesday we fed a 'frog' healthy foods and threw the unhealthy foods away.  During this activity the children were given play food and made the choice to feed the frog or not.  This was our way of checking for understanding of what foods can be eaten any time and what foods can only be eaten sometimes.

What's Coming Up?

This coming week we will be talking about Valentine's Day!  Lots of talk of love and hearts, etc.  We will do a Valentine exchange on Wednesday right before we head home for the day.  Please remember we DO NOT need you to write names on the valentines, this is just to teach the concept of an exchange, not a reading activity.  

We also want to remind you that we WILL NOT HAVE SCHOOL Friday, February 16th due to a 1/2 day of school as Palatine High School hosts the State Gymnastics meet.  Feel free to come to PHS and check that out Friday night or Saturday.  It's always a great time!

Monday, February 19th is President's Day which means we will not have school that day.  

We are DINO-mite!

We had an exciting week at Pirate Pete Preschool as we talked about dinosaurs!  The children walked in on Monday super excited (many decked out in dino shirts) and were explaining how to tell various dinosaurs apart before we even began our lessons.

We got new dinosaur toys this semester and used them to talk about the various differences in their bodies but then used them to practice measuring items around the room.  We measured how tall things were as well as how long they were and even measured our own bodies!

We also talked about the time in which dinosaurs lived and how it was in the past.  Then we practiced sequences by arranging images in puzzles to place them in order of what happens first, then second, then third, etc.  This is a tough skill to master and we will continue to do activities like this this semester to help our kiddos understand timing.  Feel free to talk about the steps you are taking to do activities at home and use words like "first", or "to start" followed by, "next" or "last", etc.

We did a lot of other math activities this week in addition to sequencing, we also sorting various dino toys into groups based on similarities and then worked on puzzles with a variety of dinosaurs and had to find the colors within the puzzles to learn how to match them to get the puzzle to fit together.  

We talked about dinosaur bones this week and what bones might look similar to people bones and what bones might look different.  Then we took actual X-rays and pretended to be doctors to assemble a human body on our white board by taping them together.

Speaking of doctors, we separated body parts after reading a book about dinosaur parts by learning where a dinosaur heart is located on a dinosaur and then where our human hearts are located and then listened to our hearts with real stethoscopes and then began assembling our organs on human puzzles.  During these activities we compared what items we saw in our dino book and what body parts we did not see in our book to compare and contrast what is on a human and what was in a dinosaur.

We worked on building dinosaurs a lot this week as well when we built them out of play dough and paper.  

 We did our fair share of science experiments this week as well with making volcanoes from the time of the dinosaurs and broke apart dino mystery bowls. 

 We created some process art this week with our hands and paint by painting our hands and marking paper to then turn our handprints into dinosaurs.  

Some children added eyes and drew with crayons on their pages as well while others simply placed paint all over the paper and were 'done'.  This is what makes process art a process; allowing the children time to create the way they want to create.

We traced letters this week a few times for some of our pre-reading activities too.  Sometimes we used dinosaur toys as stamps in paint to make dino-stomp marks on the first letter of their name.  The children would put on their smocks and head to the tables to find the sheet that had the first letter of their name on it in order to search through the ABC's of everyone's names. 

We also had the children follow letter lines on paper with dinosaur toys without paint using the toys to created letters entirely out of dinosaurs.

We did dinosaur puzzles with pictures of dinosaurs the teachers cut apart.  The children sorted the pictures of dinosaurs and glued them together on paper.  Some added one dino puzzle and some added three of four puzzles.  If your child was very interested in this activity and have a color printer at home feel free to try this with your kiddos at home.  If your child enjoys coloring, you can have them make their own puzzles by coloring in a coloring book, tearing out their picture and cutting it into 3-5 pieces to put together.

We built dinosaurs with iPads this week and searched for bones as well.  Then we jumped back in to science and broke apart dinosaur eggs to discover what types of dinosaurs were in the eggs.  We used lots of various ingredients to see which ones would make the eggs dissolve the fastest.  We used cups and droppers and a variety of liquids as our little scientists were really focused on getting those eggs opened up!

 By the time Friday rolled around we were ready to build our own dinosaurs using pictures of dino skulls and then a variety of items to represent bones and organs.  Some of the children placed bones in an organized manner representing ribs and legs while others added materials to the tops of their skeletons to represent skin.  We love seeing how creative they can get with these activities!

We built a T-Rex out of puzzle pieces on Friday and then went on a dinosaur adventure by crawling through a tunnel like a four legged dinosaur then walked across the 'dino-bridge' and ROARED at other dinos in our path like the two legged t-rex.

We read a lot of dinosaur books this week and sang a lot of dinosaur songs and roared a lot of dinosaur roars.  This was truly a preschooler favorite topic this week.

Before heading home we created dinosaurs for one last math activity; the teachers gave each child a half circle to represent a dinosaur body and then the children used various geometric shapes to add spikes, arms, legs and heads, etc.  We had a terrific week!

What's Coming Up?

This coming week we will be talking about food and nutrition.

Don't forget there is NO PRESCHOOL Friday, February 16th in light of the state gymnastics meet held here at PHS.

If your family is looking for some indoor fun in this cold, check out some Pirate basketball, gymnastics or other Pirate sports and activities at PHS this month by clicking this link.