St. Patrick's Day

This week we spent a lot of time looking for leprechauns and learning about rainbows as the children heard tales about pots of gold.  We went on many leprechaun hunts both physically in the room, around the school and even on iPads!

As we studied the colors in rainbows and practiced identifying colors and mixing them to make other colors we also learned the color green is the favorite color of the little fellows who live at the end of the rainbow!  

We built some rainbows in the afternoon with vinegar, water colored paint and baking soda.  The best part of the experiment is that you can do it over and over again with just those three supplies!  

We wrote our names, drew other letters and numbers and shapes in green colored sand before adding it to our sensory bin to continuously play in it throughout our free play time.

Then we used Lucky Charms to practice finding, sorting, counting and graphing the marshmallows in the box for some mathematic fun.  The will power in the room was amazing as no one ate any marshmallows during these activities!

We do a lot of process and product art in preschool and to show you the differences between the two we will compare these two art projects for you.  Process art is when we pulled out all sorts of craft materials that were green and allowed the children to use them any way they wanted to decorate the green shamrocks as we learned about their luck!  

Product art is when we reviewed a rainbow and what it looked like then instructed the children to paint a rainbow and add clouds to the bottom of them.  This was a project where everyone was instructed to make the same thing and the teacher evaluated the children's ability to follow instructions, not creativity.  You will often see both types of projects come home and so we thought we would take a moment to share the concepts the children are learning behind both styles of art.

To work on some fine motor skills we built shamrock necklaces of gold using golden Cheerios cereal.  If you have this cereal at home and some string, you have instant fine motor skills activities.  Remember, these skills promote the development of the fingers which impacts writing and cutting skills later.

For some scientific fun this week we built a rainbow in a jar as we discussed density and which items are heavier or lighter than others as we dyed them the colors of the rainbow and poured them into a jar.  Then, we took water colored paint and had a celery race to see which piece of celery would drink the colored water the fastest.  This was a very exciting experiment as the children asked to check the celery before they started every other activity of that day.

There were a few tricky little leprechauns in our classroom this week, some of them flipped our room around and others hid their gold in piles of goo or all around the room!  They sure were some trouble making little creatures and were mysterious as they moved around the room when no one was looking then turned to stone as soon as someone spotted them!  

In fact, to add to the craziness those leprechauns bring in the morning the 'leprechaun' turned out the lights (most of Palatine was apparently out of power for a few minutes in fact) during snack time so we showed 'the leprechaun' he couldn't trick us and we had snack by cell phone candle light!  


As the children talked to their teachers about how tricky that leprechaun is for turning out the lights, they came up with the idea to build some traps and catch him for good so he couldn't cause any more trouble and just then, the lights came back on...we are pretty sure we scared him into turning them back on for us! Ha! 

We really had an awesome time in preschool this week acting silly with all the fun this holiday brings, we hope the children enjoyed it all as much as we did!

What's Coming Up?

• We are now on spring break and will come back to preschool on Wednesday, March 30th.
  
• The two day week back will be all about transportation and we have many things in store we hope the children will play at home too!
  
• We still have two spots available for fall preschool, if you know of anyone interested in our program, feel free to share our contact information.

Singing and Dancing and Painting, Oh My!

This week in the Pirate Pete Preschool we learned all about different forms of art.  The preschoolers really enjoyed letting their creativity flow and their imaginations expand throughout this week with technology designs, plays, painting, drawing, sculpting and more!  

This technology app was a super fun way for the children to create their own beats and explore different musical patterns!  Just search "Kids Music Free" in the App Store to obtain this game.  

We also learned about acting and pretending to be different characters.  At first, everyone was a little apprehensive to act out the motions, but slowly we all became more comfortable and had fun acting silly and playing various characters!  

We worked on color identification and painting skills with this giant rainbow activity!  Teamwork was a very important part of this project!  

Getting a little messy this week, we fingerprinted with all of the colors of the rainbow leaving our traditional style of paiting with brushes was exciting and new. 

We practiced our preschool reading assignments by giving the children a list of colors written out in the color on the page; for example the word red was written in the color red which then the gave the children a clue to color a blob of red next to the word and connect the two things.

In the afternoon, we acted out the story of The Giving Tree.  Every preschooler had the opportunity to help tell the story by taking away the objects that were stuck to the tree!  

Afterward, we made our own trees by using Q-Tips and paint to create the leaves.  Using these tools as a way to paint allows the pincher grasp to be used which supports small motor development which then supports writing skills.  We will be using these things often and plan to continue in order to help the kids improve their fine motor control and writing skills.

On Wednesday this week, the morning children went on a very special field trip to visit Palatine High School's Orchestra!  We listened and danced to the Hokey Pokey, Old McDonald, and The Itsy Bitsy Spider.  

The the children got to walk around and play all of the instruments.  Feeling the vibrations of the Cellos and large Bass was one of the children's favorite parts!  

We learned how tape and paint can work together and apart all at once.  The children laid tape down with the help of their teachers and then used either their fingers or pain brushes to cover their entire paper in paint.  The teachers then pulled up the paint to show the area under the paint had remained white.

After we painted, we did a little pipe cleaner fine motor skill math as the children were given sheets of paper with numbers on them in various colors.  Each color matched a pipe cleaner that was cut in the length needed to create a numeral on the page.  They then twisted and turned the pipe cleaners (with help when needed) to create the numerals shown on the page.

Both the morning and afternoon children made their own instruments this week using two plastic spoons, a plastic egg and some beans and rice.  After placing beans and/or rice in the eggs, they closed them then held the egg with two spoons while their teachers taped the spoons together.  They had a great time playing at the circle all together too!

We learned about symmetry this week as well and created painting symmetry by putting dots of paint on 1/2 a paper then folded it to see the symmetry appear.  Some children made paintings on one side of the paper while others just experimented with colored piles of paint.

We discussed pointillism in the morning and then tried to recreate the famous work of art using Q-tips again as the tool of choice.  We also discussed Michelangelo's famous painting and how he completed it on his back then practiced drawing on our backs with paper taped to the underside of our tables.  (This was the highlight of the week!)

We drew to the beat of the music as we heard slow music, we made wavy lines and as the music beats changed, so did our hand movements with crayons at the tables.  Also at the tables we created foaming rainbows by taking water colored paint and mixing it with baking soda then adding vinegar to watch the reaction and mix colors all at the same time.

We read a book by Eric Carle about drawing a star then practiced drawing stars on the white board both according to the directions in the book as well as using our own methodology.

We talked about abstract art and made our own classroom masterpiece using splatter painting techniques which involved the children dunking objects in paint and then throwing them onto our butcher paper canvas on the floor.  What a messy good time we had and what a marvelous end result.  If you don't follow us on Instagram you might want to so you can see the end results of everyone's hard work!

The afternoon children mixed colors too; using the primary colors of yellow, red and blue to create green, purple and orange.

We created sticker art during math in the afternoon by making caterpillars out of small circular stickers based on numbers the children read.  If there was a number 5 next to the head of the caterpillar then the children placed 5 stickers behind the head, etc.

What's Coming Up?

This week will be looking forward to St. Patrick's Day and are going to work on making rainbows and searching for Leprechaun's and their posts of gold.  

Fall registration for 2016 went very smoothly and we actually have 3 more spots remaining due to so many of our preschoolers heading off to kindergarten next year.  So spread the word that we have a little more room!

Don't forget that Spring Break will be the week of March 20-the 28th so we will have three days of school this week and then won't see you again until March 30th.