A Little Goes a Long Way!

We had a one day week this week and due to that we did not have a Star of the Week presentation.  Instead, we had a good time continuing our talk about pets and non-pets as well as relationships with our pets and family and friends. As we talked about pets and non-pets we talked about dinosaurs and how impossible it is to have one of those as our pet.  

Then, we worked on putting the alphabet in order by starting at letter "a" and going all the way to "z" by connecting the dots in alphabetical order.  This was great practice for our preschoolers who tend to scribble and finish quickly since they enjoyed the challenge of singing the alphabet to get to the end.  These types of activities like connect the dots are great to help with letter recognition and putting things in alphabetical order. 

The children did a terrific job on this first task of the day and then went on to talk about things we like to do with family and how we enjoy being outside.  One of the teachers talked about how much she enjoys the warm spring weather and we looked at pictures of cherry blossom trees.  

The children then were shown how to make their own blossoms on trees as we all dreamed of warmer weather!  Some children placed lots of blossoms on their trees and others only placed a few.  The key purpose of this project was learning the word, 'blossom.'

We also talked about playing games with family and friends and then played file folder games that linked to animal families and matching mother animals to their babies as well as feeding baby birds certain amounts of worms based on numbers the children saw in the game.  These file folder games are easy to create and anyone can make them home.  (There is an actual file folder game website you can just print things out and glue into folders.)  

The purpose of these games are to allow children to self correct and play games inspired by math, science and pre-reading skills.  We bring these out from time to time and have some made for flower and garden units as well as shamrock pattern matching and even matching upper and lower case letters together.  Over the years the teachers make these for their units and we save them for game time like this. 

Speaking of games, we also had students talk about and recognize sports based on clues (like a soccer ball or tennis racket) to talk about the sport and discuss if anyone plays it with family or friends at home.  We then sent the children to trace the letters to practice writing these words at the tables.  We were excited to see some children chose to take it a step further by matching the word the the sporting image!

We talked about the reasons we like members in our families and compared that to other things we love.  One thing I am happy to report is that many of the preschoolers love their family members more than macaroni and cheese!

We then taught the children how to make flowers with their finger prints to decorate these words of love to bring home to their families.  These fingerprint projects are always good to save as a record of their prints in any 'worst case scenarios' in the future.  Finger prints can actually change in the first few years of life so it's nice to have access to any prints they may make in these early years to have on hand in case of emergency.  While no one likes to think about this, as a parent, it is something I have of my children tucked away to be prepared.

After writing about our families, we created a family member puppet with popsicle sticks.  These are a ton of fun to make and you can buy a bundle of these large sticks for a dollar or two and most general stores.  The children chose one family member to decorate this week due to time but this can be a fun winter project to do at home with many family members and to complete the entire family!  These can be used for role playing and can provide great insight as to how your child sees the people and dynamics of your family.

Moving into the afternoon,  these preschoolers made family trees by counting off one leaf for each member of their family and then glued the leaves on to a tree base.  Many of the children attempted to help their teachers write the names of the members of their families.  Then, we talked about our school family.  

We discussed how families can take care of each other and help one another then discussed what our school family looks like and who is a member of that tree.  The children were able to practice writing words on some butterflies and hearts for our school tree then were able to add those images to our tree.  We will be hanging that tree in our room as a reminder that we are here to help one another and work together as a team too.

We had a great time making picture frames of our families in the afternoon and are continuing to work on fine motor skills in this area.  Remember drawing works the same muscles in our hands that writing does and often is a great way for the children to improve these skills without even realizing it!

You may see pictures from time to time of our preschoolers playing at the various stations in our room over the course of the semester; this is done either during free play or structured play.  Free play is when the children elect the station on their own at the start or end of a period or time while structured play is when the teachers assign certain areas of our room to play to work on social skills.  

Any of these areas (kitchen, small motor, sensory table, blocks, puppet show, etc.) are great for vocabulary skills and work on various muscle skills as well.  We know some children have favorite areas of play and others would not gravitate towards certain areas until given the opportunity.  

This is why we encourage children to play in various centers during specific times of day and then allow them to make the choice on their own when lessons are being either set up or cleaned up for the moment.  Either way it's important to remember a person's attention span is his age and therefore it is important to allow that child breaks in lessons to 'get the wiggles out' and have more choices made on his own.

We finished out this one day week with a matching game of baby animals and their mothers.  There are many animals who do not look the same when they are babies as they do as adults.  For example, a baby chick doesn't look like it's mother nor does a tadpole look like a frog or a lion cub like the king of the jungle.

This is a science lesson that will be repeated with various animals throughout the semester to build knowledge in this area and to promote descriptive vocabulary as discussions are held to compare and contrast adult verses baby animals.

What's Coming Up?

Turnabout is coming to Palatine High School and with that comes another Spirit Week!  While our preschoolers will not be attending the dance, we love dressing up to show our school spirit!  It is not required for anyone to dress up this week but the children and teachers often enjoy wearing things that are out of the ordinary.

• Monday is pajama day, come to school in your coziest (an warmest) p.j.'s!
  
• Since Tuesday is Tye-Dye Day and Wednesday is Wear your College Gear Day feel free to wear something to suit either day when you come to school on Wednesday.
  
• Thursday is Neon day and Friday is always Pirate Pride day so feel free to wear either something bright and neon or your best Pirate gear (either a pirate costume, Palatine gear or anything red) on Friday.  
• [Fun fact: EVERY Friday is Spirit day and you are always encouraged to wear red or something from Palatine.]