Springing into Action!

The last week of winter in preschool was a good one.  We took a break from careers on Monday for a little while and had some St. Patrick's Day fun with shamrock necklaces and leprechaun hunts!

During the St. Patrick's Day discussion, we covered a little bit of the history behind St. Patrick's day and noticed the connection people make with the color green and shamrocks.  After that, the children found various green items in the classroom then moved on to find only the items with green in them to sort out onto green paper in the afternoon while the morning preschoolers made their shamrock necklaces out of shamrocks that spelled their names.  

As mentioned earlier, we did have some fun with a crafty little 'leprechaun' on Monday.  We heard rumor that leprechauns carry gold with them and had the children help up look for Irish clues from the leprechaun around the hallways of the school to lead us to a pot of gold.  As we were out and about we never came up on a leprechaun but our classroom was turned upside down by something or someone. 

The children helped the teachers put the classroom back together again and found gold around the room as they picked up the mess someone left behind.  

It's always such fun to hear imaginations at work and the children had a great time with finding gold and making rainbows out of volcanoes, combining blue and yellow foam to make green and hearing stories of the history of St. Patrick's Day.

Once we finished up some good green fun, we got back to our discussions and reviews of various jobs in our community and abroad.  The children always love talking about fire fighters and police officers so had our share of that this week again with some 'secret messages' from a fire fighter for pre-reading this week.  

The children were asked to cut out words given to them and put them in the correct order to make a sentence about fire safety.  We solved the puzzle together at the circle then the children were asked to work on it one on one with teachers to remember it at the tables.

We read stories about fire fighters, police stations and had a visit from a fire fighter who stopped in to say hello to the afternoon preschoolers after working at the Palatine High School Health and Safety Fair earlier in the day.  We talked a lot of about number 911 this week and what to do in case of an emergency as well as the definition of an emergency.

It is always so important to teach children how to identify safety personnel and to ensure they are familiar with what a fire fighter would look like should he/she arrive to save the day in a smoke filled room.

We wanted to make sure both groups of preschoolers worked on identifying items that are hot and those that are not hot.  This is important when looking at fire inside the house and understanding that while fire is very helpful to us, it is still hot and we need to stay away from it when we see it and instead tell an adult if we come across things like lit candles, lighters, hot items on the stove, etc.

The children played a math game on our iPads that involved counting fire fighters and then matching the number they counted to the actual numeral shown on the screen.  This is the type of game we play with concrete materials in class as well but some children tend to 'buy in' more when the iPads come out for math.

To get some energy out this week the preschoolers built up structures and used blue bean bags to knock them down while pretending to 'wipe out the fire' with the 'water' bean bags.  This became a game they played on their own during free play as the week went on.

The afternoon preschoolers talked about the vehicles safety officers use by creating police cars and fire engines during art over the course of the week while the morning preschoolers looked at home made puzzles. 

These puzzles are easy to do and can actually be made in a variety of ways at home by finding pictures of things and cutting them into strips (the more strips you cut, the harder the puzzle will be for the children).  

Our talk about careers did move from safety to other careers this week, we covered chefs and bakers this week as we made chef hats in the morning and then baked cookies to hang in our play kitchen.  

A few weeks ago we read the book Pete's a Pizza and acted out the story as a class and since then the children ask us on a regular basis to 'make some pizza.'

The children act out the parts of the dough and we 'kneed them', add toppings then have them jump up and down to cook them then 'cut the pizza' and we all enjoy it!  We have had a terrific time 'cooking' and given the enthusiasm the children have had with all this we keep bringing more chef materials into the mix.

Besides little chefs, we have our roles of student, gardener, actor, author, and scientist to name a few this week.  The children had to complete puzzles and catch butterflies then put on plays and listened to stories written by famous authors like Dr. Seuss and completed math activities by sorting colored fish after hearing the story One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.  

We became scientists by hypothesizing what color water would 'win' the absorption race as we moved liquid from jars containing various colored water into smaller jars by using paper towels as the path.  We used the parachute and golf balls to paint in containers by shaking the metal tins around causing the foam golf balls to make designs on paper.

This was a terrific week and we look forward to a week off of school to recharge and hopefully see some sunshine.  When we return on March 30th we will be in a new season of spring and start talking about the wonderful world of imagination more.  Look for fun Disney characters to appear as well as lots of silly activities and games.