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.