What is the huge word we talked about this week?

 Transportation! This week we learned the word transportation means to get from one place to another. After listening to an awesome star of the week presentation we read a book that highlighted the various forms of transportation that exist. In the book we talked about boats and planes and trains and trucks and fire engines and more!

 After reading the book about all the forms of transportation we built our own cars and trucks with Legos and blocks, and played with our train table driving the trains in and around the station, as well as using geometric shapes to create various forms of transportation. 

 We demonstrated how we know airplanes live in the sky. On light blue paper we built popsicle stick airplanes and then added clouds to remind us how high they are in the sky.

 After building airplanes we played red light, yellow light, green light in the classroom by walking around pretending to drive cars and trucks until we heard the teachers shout red light or yellow light or green light. It was a nice way to pretend our classroom was a town filled with people coming and going.

 After driving around the classroom we realized we needed license plates; so we built them out of paper. The children all put their names on their license plates which was great practice for them to work on improving their name writing skills. Then we gave them stickers to decorate their license plates. Stickers are terrific fine motor activities for kids because they love peeling them and placing them everywhere and it works the same muscles in their hands that holding a pencil dots. If you want your child to improve their handwriting - get them some stickers!

 After making our license plates we were back to pretending to be cars and we needed a good car wash! The children took turns pretending to drive through the homemade car wash where they went through the soapy bubbles, then the water to rinse off and then the air dry to finish off their car. Most of the preschoolers agreed their cars were so dirty they had to go through the car wash about four or five times!

 We then later became engineers this week as we loaded the train by sorting objects by color and placing them in the right train car before the train could take off.

Then we followed directions to make hot air balloons.  We talked about the various parts of a hot air balloon (the basket and the balloon) then the kids painted a brown basket then used our dot paints to follow the lines on their paper to create the balloon parts.

All that hot air balloon work got us thinking about flying so we hopped into our laundry basket air planes, stretched out our arms and took flight in the classroom with the help of our teachers for engines of course! 

Back on land on Friday we discussed the rules of the road and asked who remembered what each color in our red light, yellow light, green light game meant in the world of traffic and then we got our hands ready to make our own light signals.

We practiced cutting this week as well as we cut apart pictures of various forms of transportation and glued them into the correct place they are used.  For example, helicopters and planes were in the sky and boats and jet skis are found in the water while cars and trucks and trains are on land.  

Some of our kiddos are doing great with their cutting while others seem to only use scissors in preschool.  Please help your children with child safety scissors by letting them cut things at home like straws and play doh that are easier to hold as opposed to paper.  These are skills they will need in kindergarten when no one can help them so the sooner they practice the better.

Before heading home we rolled a home made dice on our rug and acted out modes of transportation like flying, choo chooing and walking!  Then, we sang songs about those same modes of transportation.

What's Coming Up?

We are going to be talking about seasons as weather.  It will be perfect timing as the weather starts to cool off and falls kicks into high gear.  

Be on the lookout for a text canceling preschool on Friday, Sept. 30th.  It is our homecoming week and we will have an assembly.  Once we know the bell schedule we will let you know if we are able to still host preschool or not.  

Being that Spirit week is about to be upon us, tomorrow will be Pajama day!  It's the best day of the year!  Come wearing your favorite PJ's!

Scrub a dub!

Oh what a week we had learning about health and hygiene.  Besides playing and working on our months, dates and weather and seasons, we worked on talking about making our teeth and bodies healthy. 

We talked about our physical well being first by counting healthy food items and practiced drawing the numbers that represented the amounts.  

Then we did an obstacle course to get our bodies moving and working through balance beams, jumps and races.

After running around the room with our obstacle course we changed gears and brushed our teeth with toothbrushes to wipe out the dirt and bring on the white shine.

We also talked about words that related to the dentist and taking care of teeth.  The children then looked for the first letter of these words next to the picture hint to match them for word and letter recognition to hep prepare them for reading.

Also this week we sorted through magazine photos of food items and placed them on a happy tooth and a sad tooth based on whether or not the food item was good for our bodies or not more of a sometimes food.

We did a little more for our bodies by working on some exercise moves.  While the teachers had a few for us planned, the preschoolers also helped us with some sit ups and push ups.  We were very impressed with their eagerness to work out like they have seen some of their parents do at home!

We played a few games on our iPads this week that had to do with choosing healthy foods as well as preparing them and also games that promote proper hygiene through bathing, grooming and dental care.

We created mouthes with marshmallows for teeth and the children helped to count out the correct amount of teeth we have in our mouth.

On Friday we took on the role of dentist to fill in some cavities.  We used puffy paint which is a mixture of shaving cream and glue and painted a tooth with toothbrushes then topped it off with a splash of sparkle (glitter) in order to show the clean and fixed tooth.  Many of the children took time to brag about what good dentists they were during this activity.

We read a book about how to keep germs to ourselves and the importance of covering our sneeze and washing our hands as well as a book about preparing and growing vegetables in order to make vegetable soup.

To keep our hands healthy and in turn keep our bodies healthy we talked about how many germs are on our hands each day and how afraid germs are of soap. 
 Then, we took a bowl of water and sprinkled pepper all over the surface to represent germs on our hands.  The teachers then took a little bit of liquid soap on their finger, touched the surface and the "germs" ran away from the soap to the sides of the bowl.  This is something anyone can do at home and your children are sure to want to perform this trick over and over again.

Before going home this week we sang more songs by our beloved Dr. Jean where we acted out various food items.  The teacher's favorite was the peeling of the avocado to make guacamole.  Check it out by clicking here.

What's Coming Up?

This coming week we will be talking about transportation.