Welcome to 2017!

Pirate Pete Preschool is back in session! Our first week back and we had a wonderful start with a Star of the Week presentation and worked on learning the new year; 2017. 

This semester we have a morning preschool and an afternoon preschool; therefore pictures from both the morning and afternoon will be showcased each week in the blog. To start us off, the morning preschoolers worked a little bit of pasta math. They used a piece of spaghetti standing up on paper with play-doh as a base to hold up a certain number of hollow pastas on the spaghetti.  

 If the children were given the number five, they had to place five pieces of pasta on the spaghetti. If you have Play-doh at home and some pasta you can play this game to reinforce these concepts in your very own kitchen!

 This week we talked a lot about family, school and emotions. The morning and afternoon preschoolers worked on understanding the vocabulary word, "emotions". They played a game where they roll the dice to act out an emotion while also pretending to be an animal. For example they might be a happy penguin or a sad fish.  Many giggles were had in the classroom as the random animal and emotions pairings took place.

We used technology in both the morning and afternoon preschool sessions this week at circle time in a large group and sometimes we worked in small groups playing games to reinforce what we were learning.  Remember that while we incorporate technology in the class it does not mean that is all we do.  Technology reinforces lessons and concepts in a way that allows the children to gain experience using it for the future in education, this will only help them moving forward as they start to use it in grade school.

The morning preschoolers worked on some fine motor skills by using stickers to create fun faces on a blank template.  Some children made eyes, a nose and a mouth while others filled the face with color.  Remember this was about the process of peeling and placing stickers to create better writers later, not to make the 'perfect' face.

The afternoon preschoolers worked on making their very own pirate hats and eye patches as they acclimated to Pirate Pete Preschool.  We practiced saying, "argh," in our pirate gear as we worked on our fine motor skills using stickers as well.

Some of our preschoolers this semester are new to the program and we enjoyed taking some time to talk about our school and introduce all the great things we have to play here during free play as well as all the fun things we can do during structured learning time too. 

We worked on cutting in the afternoon to see what skills we will need to build by asking the preschoolers to cut out apples and fill them with paper they tore up.  All of these skills work the same muscles that are needed to write and cut and draw and paint so seeing how well the children can cut and rip paper helps us assess a starting point.

This week we read books about feelings and family as well as the topic of coming back to school.  The children are all doing a nice job learning how to stay quiet at the circle and learn the expectations of school when a lead teacher is reading.  This will help them when they move on to kindergarten when the teacher will expect them to sit still on the rug during story hour.

In the afternoon we broke out the trampoline and got some of our wiggles out before heading back to table time to learn some science with our animal forms, math with our pattern frogs.

The morning preschoolers worked on some math as well early this week as they counted various emotion images and placed the correct number next to that amount.  

We still have letter of the day this semester so the morning preschoolers will be refreshing and improving their skills while the afternoon preschoolers might be learning this system for the first time.  Each day we work on looking at and talking about images that start with the letter of the day then sound out the first letter and then we practice writing it on the white board then at the tables on sheets to take home.

It has been a great time this week getting to know one another through the topic of emotions and learning how to identify the various types of emotions by seeing the expression on people's faces.  We drew a lot of these expressions this week and demonstrated them through conversations and play as well this week.

In learning more and more about ourselves this week we also made paper people in the afternoon.  Some of the children made one person and then went to go play while others made their entire family.  

The thing to remember is that a person's attention span is their age which means that for some of our young preschoolers, one person is all they are able to do at this time.  As they grow older and have more time in school they will be more content to work longer.  Understanding this is the heart of differentiation which is the idea each person needs to be able to work at their ability which is what we strive for in our program.  

Speaking of differences, we learned this week in the morning and afternoon sessions that fingerprints are different for each finger and each person.  No two people have the same fingerprints and we practiced making them with ink pads this week.

As we talked about families this week and where we came from and who we live with we built houses out of magnetic tiles and then placed the amount of people who live with us inside the houses.  We then practiced more math by adding and subtracting people from the various houses we built and added houses together to build condos and apartments as well.

While some kids were building magnetic houses, another station played with our doll house and the various family members we have.  This role playing helps with vocabulary and learning about our children and their families.  

To learn about our bodies this week we also took some time to put together our skeleton puzzles and then used some x-rays to match the pieces to help understand what our bones look like inside all of us.

What's Coming Up?

This coming week we will be learning about weather and the seasons.  We are in for another week settling back in to the school day and enjoying discussions about the upcoming changes in weather and seasons.