I like it, I love it!

As always we enjoyed a terrific Star of the Week presentation at the start of the week.  We are focusing on a variety of things we enjoy this week from reading books to painting to computer games we enjoy playing.

We started off talking about how much we love to play outside with a fun painting project that involved stamping ink, paint brushes and markers or crayons as the children created trees.  This was a great review of our October activities where we focused more on trees.  While some preschoolers are still building their small motor skills in art, there were some who were able to distinctly share with us their image of a tree, and it actually looked like one!  Keep up the good work Pirates!

As we talked about playing outside, we practiced moving our writing utensils by drawing the path of lightening in the air and then on paper.  

We worked on our reading skills with a pre-kindergarten activity reading sentences with our teachers and figuring out the correct picture of animals at the end of the sentence.

  This type of activity is very common in kindergarten and we enjoyed working on it as we talked about various animals we liked, such as a pig, dog, cat or hen.

These activities are great for cutting and gluing skills as well.  Allowing the children to practice cutting out basic squares then sounding out the 3 letter words of the animals listed above is great practice for our preschoolers who will be moving on to kindergarten next year and a terrific introduction for our 3 year-olds to expose them to work they will see in the future.

As we talked about animals, one of the teachers shared her love of the zoo and seeing the bears. 

Then, the preschoolers went to the tables and found bears of various colors and sorted them by size; then organized them by size and color and completed patterns with them as well.  Some children even used the bins the bears were in to create caves as they sorted and counted them.

After all that math, we moved on to science and the concepts of sink and float.  Each child had a turn placing an item into a clear container filled with water to see if it would sink or float.  This is such an easy activity to do at home to reinforce these concepts and I know the whole family would enjoy finding things around the house to test out.

We got some of our wiggles out this week when we walked 'balance beams' (tape marks on the floor) and danced and sang, "The Cool Bear Hunt" and played a Simon Says game with pre-determined moves written on some dice.

When it was time to slow down a bit, we read books the 'old school way' as well as the 'new school way' and learned about giraffes who can't dance as well as a tortoise and a hare.

One of our teachers loves the arts, so after we heard a story, we matched upper and lower case letters and sounded out words using letters written on paint cans and paint brushes.  She shared her love of creating art with the children when she asked them to draw on her bulletin board with white crayons to really make it a classroom work of art!

Then, she sent the preschoolers off to work with their teachers using various apps on our iPads that help with fine motor skills.  

We used 'Dot to Dot', 'Dot to Dot Adventure', 'Kids Academy Reading and Tracing All In One Activity,' 'Funny Animals', and the 'Preschool Academy Workbook,' to help the children focus their hand movements by staying on the lines in these applications.  

These types of games are self-correcting because they stop moving when the child goes off the assigned path to help them slow down and really focus on what they are doing.  Many of these apps also help the children with letter, number and animal recognition. 

The most important rule when you use technology with children is to preview it first and walk through the app with your child to ensure he/she knows what to do and how to properly 'play the game.'  These activities shouldn't be used as 'babysitting' but regulated learning opportunities for your child to see and hear concepts and materials they are also learning in school. 

After about 5 minutes with our iPads, the children were called back to circle time to hear from another teacher about something she hangs in her room that helps her to sleep well at night; her dream catcher.  

She showed the children the dream catcher she made to catch the bad dreams and allow only the good ones to go through.  She talked about how this is a Native American tradition we would be creating in class for our math activity.  

The children were then instructed to head to the tables where they needed to thread the yarn through holes marked on their dream catchers in the order of 1-11.

We also went alphabet fishing (after talking about how fun it is to go fishing) and we worked to 'catch' ping pong balls labeled with all the letters of the alphabet.  As the children pulled out the letters, they needed to place them in trays labeled in the order of the alphabet. 

The kids really enjoyed catching these floating letters and figuring out where the letters went in the trays.  You can find ping pong balls at Wal-Mart for under $10 and after you label them with the letters of the alphabet there is no end to the fun you can have with them during bath time!

What's Coming Up?

Remember, we will NOT have preschool the week of Thanksgiving! (November 22 - Nov. 30th)  Enjoy this week off with your family and stay warm!  Who knows, you might even get to go sledding!

Spring Registration is in full swing, AM Preschoolers should all have paid tuition by now ($200) and we are currently accepting NEW preschoolers for our PM session ($150). Please pass this information along to anyone who has a 3-5 year old looking for a preschool program.  Details on the afternoon session are found here and our Pirate Pete Preschool Website Link is here.