Thanks for a great November!

Thanks for a terrific Star Student poster this week, we will send another one home after our Thanksgiving Week off.  

Our last week of November showed some great activities that were inspired by what our preschoolers and teachers have said they like to do. 

We talked about our love of activities like swimming then our love of learning about people from around the world as we practiced following number directions in a color by numbers assignment.  The children were to follow the directions printed on the page (along with their teachers help)
to color certain numbers certain colors.

  The idea was to perform number recognition skills while they also talked about the traditional wardrobe worn by Native Americans.

Our teacher in charge this day then allowed the preschoolers to practice building homes out of the various bricks we have in school and discussed which shapes would work best to make the structure taller or more stable.  The children soon learned the triangle blocks are better suited for the 'roof' and not for the base of their buildings.

While some children were building with blocks, others were building vocabulary as they played a matching word and sound game with teachers at the tables.  

Once everyone rotated through our stations, we all gathered at the circle rug to play one of Mrs. Stary's favorite games: EduKitchen!  The children took turns learning about words like recycle and sorting trash into glass, paper or plastic as well as other activities involved in cooking in the kitchen.  This app is growing to be a favorite for many teachers and preschoolers alike in our program.

After we changed teachers and worked on the number of the day (now that we are done with the alphabet) we then worked on recognizing the letters that make up our names by asking the children to find the paper at the tables that showed their name.  

Once they found their names, the children were given a choice of a few small items to glue down on the page, covering each letter to practice spelling their names more in school. This is something you can do at home with your child using a little glue and any small items you have (rice, beans, pasta, etc.) Simply write the child's name across a page and let them do the rest.

We sang a preschool favorite, "My Mother is a Baker," this week and had a blast acting out the various characters in the song.  Then, it was time for science! 

The children had a blast making 'elephant toothpaste' out of yeast, warm water and colored peroxide.  

Simply pour a little hydrogen peroxide in the bottom of a narrow water bottle and then mix the active dry yeast in a separate bowl.  As soon as the yeast has been mixed, pour it into the bottle and watch the chemical reaction!  The best part was getting to feel the warmth that is created when these ingredients mix and then play in it!

 As some children were making 'elephant toothpaste' others were playing a great new fine motor skills game, Marble Maze!  One of our teachers glued straws she had cut up to various lengths onto cardboard pieces then placed a marble on the cardboard and wrapped the maze in plastic wrap.  

The children then had to use their index fingers and thumbs to move the marble through the maze and back!  Terrific fun and great practice working those finger muscles (which improve writing quality) as well as forward thinking!

 We had another name recognition project this week as the children looked for their names written in tape on finger-painting paper.  They then painted over their entire page and let the paint dry.  On our planning day, the teachers peeled back the tape to reveal the children's names in white against the beautiful painted pages they created!

One of our teachers loves the ocean so she found many ways to practice building fine motor skills with an animal trails and ocean animals writing packet.  The first page started out with a few basic lines, wavy, straight, etc.; then progressed to lines that were closer together with a shorter frequency of waves and zigs and zags.  


Children also could look for various creatures of the sea and outline them as well so this packet had a little bit of everything for each stage of fine motor development.  Feel free to look through this packet and work on it more while you are at home this next week of Thanksgiving.

After working on drawing, we made some fish out of colorful paper plates.  The children were shown two straight lines to cut which created the tail of the fish.  

We glued that triangle to the back of the large circle then the children were able to add eyes and other decorations to their fish.

Some added many eyes, some only one and other children drew teeth or added pom-pons for scaly designs too!

Our set of teachers on Friday talked about how much they loved to play outside and decided to bring a bit of the outdoors in.  Our children first split into two groups; the first went to the tables to work on word puzzles while the other played a dice game resembling Simon Says. 

The word puzzles showed pictures of outside objects that had been cut in half.  As the children found the matching pictures, they sounded out the first sounds of each object to practice 'reading' the words.  

The children at the circle took turns rolling dice the teachers labeled with outdoor animals and the children then acted out whichever animal appeared on the dye.  Kangaroo was their favorite!

In education, we know how important class size is to understanding material, which is why we break a lot of our activities down into stations of smaller groups of preschoolers.  

This makes the activities more meaningful for the children and allows teachers to really focus in on the children in the smaller groups as opposed to focusing more on classroom management because human beings naturally pay more attention when in smaller groups.

Once everyone had a turn at both stations, we split up into two more groups and played a sensory game at the tables while the other group went to the circle area to use our sensory table.

The paper bags at the tables were filled with items we find outside like sticks, rocks, pine cones, leaves, dirt and more.  

The children reached into the bags and had to guess what might be inside merely by using their sense of touch.  We talked about what felt bumpy, smooth, rough and soft.  The children loved this activity and it can be done at home too even if you don't have a paper bag.  

Find an old purse, grocery bag, or backpack and take turns with your children finding objects around the house and place them inside.  It's a lot of fun guessing what it might be and talking about the clues a sense of touch provides.

As people were playing the guessing game at the tables, the sensory table at the circle was a busy place as the kids 'got dirty' digging for outdoor treasures teachers brought in this week.  

The last teacher of the week shared her love of the book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, with the children first by reading the giant book version of it to them and then having them make their own 'cookies' at the tables for the math activity of the day.

The children were each given a paper 'cookie' and a pile of chocolate chips they were instructed NOT to eat.  After reading the number on the cookie (most were higher than 10) with the teachers, the children had to count out and glue on the correct number of chocolate chips to their cookie.

We decided to challenge the kids more this week with the higher numbers in order to differentiate the skill set more for our older preschoolers.  By the time a child is in kindergarten, he/she is supposed to know how to count from 1-20 so we took this opportunity to really reach higher for some of the children who will be heading off to kindergarten next year.

After some yummy 'cookies' our preschoolers then made the mice who wanted to eat them by using a folded paper plate with whiskers and a tale.  The children were instructed to create ears and place them on the mouse where labeled then add a nose and eyes.
These little creatures were so cute the chidren loved playing with them but they were a little to wet with glue to send home in backpacks so we will be showing them off when we get back from Thanksgiving break on December 1st.

What's Coming Up?

We will not have preschool the week of Thanksgiving so we will see everyone on December 1st for the last month of preschool this semester.

The month of December will focus on Places To Go and we will be exploring the places close to home as well as around the world.  We might even head to outer space a time or two!  While we will not be focusing on Christmas, we will have winter activities/projects and be learning about things that are celebrated around the world at various times of the year.

Our Holiday Celebration will be on Friday, December 19th from 9:30-11:00 AM and this will be our last day of the fall semester.  We will be going on winter break after that followed by the end of the semester and finals at the high school.  Our second semester starts in mid January and once our new teachers are ready to go, we will start the spring semester of preschool in the beginning of February.  


We are still taking PM preschoolers at this time, please have anyone interested email Kris Stary at kstary@d211.org for more information or visit our Pirate Pete Preschool Webpage or the Registration Page of this blog.