Staying Clean and Healthy

Our Safety and Hygiene week is one of the most important ones!  The children learn about keeping their bodies healthy and clean, as well as about our various community helpers who work to keep us all safe each day.  

For this dental health project, each child was given a picture of a tooth and a pile of cotton balls.  The cotton balls represented the bubbles and foam we create when we brush our teeth.  They glued the cotton balls around the tooth's smiling face to show that clean teeth are happy teeth!  

This app on the iPads helped teach the children about the police and firemen.  After they assembled the correct emergency vehicle, they drove it down the street, aiming to collect the buckets of water to help the fire fighters put out the fire.  The children really enjoyed this app!  If you have an iPad or iPhone at home make sure you download Fireman Hero-Animal Rescue & Fire House Kids Games!  

Each semester during our safety unit, we always talk about dangerous items we should not touch when we see them at home.  Many of the examples that we discuss are hot.  For this small motor activity, the children had to cut out the items and sort them according to whether they are hot or cold to the touch; then they glued each one in the proper box.

We listened to a story this week about fire fighters and police officers and what they do each day to help our community.  We had many great discussions about these careers as well as those of doctors and dentists this week as we learned about how all of these people work to keep us safe and healthy.

All day on Friday we talked about the importance of brushing our teeth.  We played a game on the iPad (Sago Mini Monsters) that helped us understand how and when to brush our teeth.  After feeding the monsters, their teeth turned gray which told it us it was time to brush their teeth!  

We also reviewed the different circular and up-and-down movements we use when brushing our teeth.  To practice this and work on fine motor writing skills, the children were given a worksheet and had to trace the looped and zig-zag dotted lines from the toothbrush to the teeth.  

A happy tooth is a clean, white tooth!  Each child glued eyes and drew a mouth on their cut-out tooth.  Some of them colored their teeth so that it appeared to be dirty and then drew a frowning face on it instead! 

We had a very nice 'germ' activity done this week with glitter germs as we placed a little glitter on the hands of the children then asked them to shake hands or give high fives to one another and 'pass around' the 'germs.'  

We talked about how many of these germs we could see by using glitter spread quickly while we then the germs we can't see spread just as quickly.  We then talked about the power of soapy water and washed the 'glitter germs' away. 

Using everyday household items for art projects can be a lot of fun!  So to end our week we took an old tooth brush and a little bit of tooth paste and used them as great painting tools.  The children scrubbed their paper teeth making sure to cover the entire thing with tooth paste.  Brushing every single one of our teeth is very important and this activity helped our room to smell minty fresh for the weekend!  

What's Coming Up?

• This week we will be discussing various jobs and continuing our community helper discussions to extend past just the fire and safety patrols.  
  
  
• The District 211 College Night is this Wednesday, October 21 and Palatine High School hosts this event.  Therefore we have a shortened schedule at the high school and will be canceling preschool for this day.  The good news is this will be our last crazy week for a while!  Woo hoo!  So preschool will be on Monday and Friday this week.
  
  
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  The annual Pirate Pete Preschool Halloween Party will be on Friday, October 30th from 9:30AM to 10:45AM.  Invitations will come home this coming Friday.  Parents and younger siblings are encouraged to attend and help us Trick or Treat around the school.
  
  
• Be on the look out for a flyer about the annual Palatine High School Trick or Treat with Pirate Pete night which will be on Thursday, October 29th at 5:00PM.  It is FREE and open to the community.