Scrub a Dub

What a busy one day week we had taking about hygiene. We started our day with the Valentine exchange we missed last Friday. 

Lots of great treats and sweet notes for friends were placed in our Valentine bags to go home and enjoy. 

After passing out Valentines, we had our first morning Star of the Week present her poster to the class. The morning classes have picked up where we left off last semester and we are starting afternoon Stars of the Week on Monday. 

Each child gets a turn working on his/her poster for "homework" over their assigned weekend and then shares his/her work with the class. (You will know it is your child's turn when the poster comes home with him/her on a Friday.)  Some students put actual photos and some create drawings, some have help writing their words and others do it themselves.  

The best part of these posters is the preschoolers share their wishes of being princesses, doctors, fire fighters, etc. and their favorite places like the park, the zoo and Grandma's house. My recommendation is to always help the child write whatever answer he/she comes up with, there are no incorrect answers. 

Once we started working on our lessons for Hygiene, the kids had a blast practicing the correct way to brush their teeth, and then tried to remove the yellow from the teeth (by painting with white paint and tooth brushes). 

We played a few terrific math games too! The preschoolers had to add and take away germs from felt hands and decide who had the least and the most germs of the group. 

The second game involved finding and sorting images from the bathroom at home that might be found in the bathtub, the medicine cabinet or by the sink. The kids collected the images and then created a classroom graph of these images to decide which area had the most items. 

Each preschooler was later given a paper plate mouth with a number on the top in the morning and a paper mouth in the afternoon. 

The morning preschoolers placed stickers inside their mouth based on the number written on the outside while the afternoon preschoolers rolled dice to see what number of marshmallow teeth would need to be glued inside their paper mouth. 

We had a great time with science too!  Try is one at home, it requires only 3 things and is a lot of fun.  We took a bowl filled with water and asked the children to pretend it was our skin. 

Then, we showed them a pepper container and asked them to pretend the pepper was filled with germs. They each were able to shake some 'germs' onto the 'hand' until the entire surface area was filled with pepper. 

Then, we asked the kids what germs might be afraid of and they said,"soap!"  We placed one drop of soap on the teacher's finger and as she touched the water, the 'germs' moved away from the soap. 

After doing thing in multiple places on the surface of the water, the children explained to us that germs do no like soap and we need soap to remove the germs from our hands and this is why we are supposed to wash our hands often. 

During free play, another fun experiment was done with the kids with vegetable oil and food coloring. By taking a bowl with water in it, the teacher placed enough vegetable oil in the bowl to cover the top surface. 

Next, she dropped some red food coloring into the bowl as well and used tooth picks to "pop" the food coloring bubbles. They went from floating on the oil to mixing with it turning the water orange (since red and yellow make orange). 

The kids loved asking her to,"do it again," as they chose to hang out with her during free time. This experiment was going to be done in the afternoon on Friday and since we cancelled school for those students, we wanted to give the children the opportunity to still see and enjoy it this week. 

Free play is just that. The kids are given time at various points throughout the day to get to choose what they want to play. 

Sometimes they want to see the science experiment with the teacher other times they want to be read to,  sometimes play with the train, and other times do puzzles or blocks. This is the time for them to work on their social skills and sometimes fine motor skills or just plain have fun and take a mental break. 

If you're looking to help your child better his/her writing skills, try one of these two ideas we did this weekend preschool. We put large trays filled with flour (you can use sand or salt or sugar as well) and then we let the kids practice making their 'S's, a very hard letter to learn how to write. 

The other option was to trace lines in different ways.  Zig zag, wavy, curved, straight, etc.  These hand movements mimic what we do when we write. By practicing these motions, our fine motor skills improve and writing becomes easier.

 

To end our day of hygiene, we had a visitor from a friend of the school nurse. He came to teach the boys and girls how to scrub their teeth properly in the afternoon. 

He showed all of our new preschoolers how to scrub in a circular motion and not just up and down and side to side. The kids had a great time brushing his teeth on Wednesday! (Thanks to one of our preschoolers for this suggestion of a fun Yo Gabba Gabba video about germs, enjoy!)

What's coming up?

This coming week we will be talking about habitats and having a lot of fun talking about different places people and animals live around the world. 

We also have a fun week of dress-up if you choose! Monday will be roll out of bed day (wear your favorite pajamas to school) and Wednesday will be patterns day for the preschoolers (we have class colors day so the teachers will have on colors according to their age while our preschoolers can wear as many patterns as possible) and Friday is Super Pirate Fan day (dress up like a pirate or wear your favorite Palatine gear or lots of RED). It is not required to dress up for the spirit week but it's fun to show some pride in our school as we enjoy these silly days at school.

We LOVE Preschool!

Well, one week down, many more to go!  

We have had quite the beginning to the Spring 2014 semester. Our first day of preschool was wonderful and our new preschoolers did a terrific job adjusting to the new routines. We have already had 2 birthdays in the AM session and talked about how much we love our family and friends as we prepared for Valentine's Day and practiced our safety procedures a bit earlier than planned.

The first day of school was filled with learning and remembering all our routines of school. We start each day with the "Welcome Song," (many kids in the AM session call it the Good Morning Song).  After we sing the Welcome Song, we are reminded by our veteran preschoolers to sing the Days of the Week Song and then we work on the Today Board. Each day we talk about the season, the month, the year, the date, the weather and what our buddy Pirate Pete should wear for the day to keep warm. 

After this, we look at visual clues to guess what we might be doing and talking about for the day. The teachers in each period create these visual clues based on their lessons and activities for the day. 

Now that we will be having two sessions of preschool, you will see pictures from both sessions so everyone can have a chance to see what is going on throughout our time together at Pirate Pete Preschool. 

This week, we brought the cold snow indoors for science and had the preschoolers built snow hearts with cookie cutters since it has been way too cold outside to enjoy a lot of the terrific snow we see as we enter school. 

Each day when the goodbye teachers come to see the preschoolers, they start their time with the children doing letter of the day.  Again, using visual cues, the preschoolers will see pictures that all start with the same letter. As they look at the pictures and we practice the sounds, the preschoolers then guess what the letter of the day will be. 
Then, anyone who has that letter at the start of their name gets to come up to the white board and draw it with their teacher. After this, all of the preschoolers go to the tables to practice writing the letter of the day.  
I made this game for my daughter (a four-year-old) to practice associating sounds with the letters of the alphabet.  It is similar to what we do with the preschoolers for letter of the day so feel free to try it at home with your kids too.

In order to get some of our wiggles out, we went into the main hallway to play a Valentine heart twister game. 

We also had various hearts of different colors in the hall and the preschoolers had to find the color that coordinated with the one they were assigned (blue with blue, green with green, etc.)  Both of these kinds of games are fun ways to allow for large motor activities when we can't get outside the way we would like to this time of year.

We played various math games that evolved sorting (not eating) those terrific candy hearts that are so popular this time of year. The preschoolers did a great job sorting the hearts by color and then also sorting by amounts and deciding which colors had the most and which color appeared the least. 

Those little candy hearts came in handy as well for many science experiments. Did you know the orange ones seem to float more than any other color?  Ah the discoveries we make!  To try this at home, check out how we did the experiment here.  

We made MANY projects for this Valentine season for our refrigerators and walls at home to share with our loved ones.  The children were able to decorate their treasure bags we will use to collect Valentines on Wednesday when preschool resumes. (We call them treasure bags so they can keep anything they would like inside them once they get home.)  The Valentine exchange will be the first thing we do when the kids arrive at school after our Welcome Song and Today Board activities are complete.   I know they are looking forward to it. 

Besides all of our crafts, counting and experimenting, we heard many stories, books, enjoyed free play and getting to know each other.  We did some early reading activities where the children had to find their name written on a heart and bring it to the teacher, we played tea party and had a terrific first week!

On a separate note, our safety unit is not for a few weeks but the morning crew practiced our procedures for lock downs on Friday. I must say the children were amazing and our system worked wonderfully to keep everyone safe. I know when it comes time to practice our drills for fire, tornadoes and lock downs during safety week, our preschoolers will be able to explain to us what to do and how to stay safe at school. These procedures will vary from building to building but as they move on to kindergarten but they will have the background knowledge of what these drills mean and how to do them. 

What's Coming Up?

Please remember while we don't have school today for President's Day, we also have no school on Friday this week due to Palatine High School hosting the State Gymnastics Meet so while we won't hold preschool, come to PHS and check it out!

All preschool parents have gotten a school calendar for the semester sent home but remember you can always check the blog and click the What's Coming Up link to sync your Google Calendar with ours.

We will be starting up our Star of the Week again next week so look for those posters to come home with your child when it is his or her turn to work on one.  

Wednesday we will do a Valentine Exchange since we were not able to do it on Valentine's Day last week.