Healthy Kids

The week before spring break we worked on getting our minds and bodies healthy as we hoped for warmth in the coming spring weather.  We started out by reading the book, From Head to Toe, by Eric Carle and playing a matching card game to warm up our bodies for some exercise.  

There are actually a lot of games for kids out there that are linked to the famous children's author and we play a lot of them at school for various themes before and after reading some of his books. 

Once we were warmed up we started really moving with trampoline time, hula hooping and some other random exercises on one of our home made dice that allowed the children to take turns rolling it to see which 'work out move' we would do next.

Once we were finished with our work out for a while we talked about healthy foods for our bodies and our teeth.  We talked about what can make our bones and teeth strong verses what makes them unhealthy and then performed the first of a few different egg experiments for the week.   This is how this experiment worked.

To review the idea of how important it is to brush our teeth so we keep them from turning colors and loosing their enamel (like in the video with the eggs above) we used tooth brushes to paint yellow teeth white to give the kiddos another visual of this concept.

We also did some letter recognition with teeth on mouths and asked the children to find the tooth with the letter M, etc.  We practiced cutting out mouthes a few times this week as well to work on this skill.  Please be practicing cutting at home with your children, it takes a lot of practice to get this fine motor skill down.

We made teeth out of mini marshmallows this week either as a fine motor skill or math activity and worked on bringing the concept of baby teeth and adult teeth as well as dental care home.

We also talked about foods we can eat any time and the foods we can only eat sometimes.  While most preschoolers know birthday cake is a sometimes food, they are still learning the difference between fruit and fruit snacks and many are still working on being able to tell us which is the sometimes and which is the any time food out of those two choices. 

The afternoon preschoolers were able to review the parts of the body they learned at the start of the semester with our skeleton puzzle and were able to put him together in a much shorter amount of time.  They also learned about some of the organs we have in our bodies as we talked about our hearts and lungs ad stomachs.   Using these body puzzles the children wear a vest and work with others to figure out where on the body these organs go.  We were able to use our stethoscope to listen to our hearts as well but we will get into that later.

Speaking of organs in our bodies, the children in both the afternoon and morning sessions learned about how important our lungs are to helping us breathe.  We made our own sets of lungs and then used straws to practice blowing air into them to simulate the enlarging and deflating of our lugs when we breathe.  We hope the children were able to demonstrate this at home for you.

We talked about x-rays in the morning and afternoon as well and made our own x-rays of our hands by using Q-tips for bones on black paper after tracing our hands.  We also looked at actual x-rays this week and guessed which bones we were looking at with each picture.

We also did a lot of science experiments about soap and germs and learned more about why we need to wash our hands and when we should wash our hands and bodies.  We washed dinosaurs and our hands and made some toothpaste too!

Then, we used Glo-Germ to show the children how long we need to wash our hands every time.  We practiced singing the ABC's in order to make sure we were using the bubbles in our soap long enough to wash the solution off our hands.  

Glo-Germ is great because it can only be seen in black light so when the children think they have washed it off, we can check to find out if they are right.  During our safety and sanitation unit our teachers do this exercise as well as a part of their training for Gateways credentials to work in our facility. 

 

As stated before we used the stethoscope this week to help the children not only understand where their heart is located in their body but also how it works to beat faster or slower based on activity.  We jumped up and down and ran in place, did push ups and jumping jacks then took turns listening to our hearts and letting the children describe the beats of their hearts.  

Then we did some yoga stretches and poses to slow down our hearts and laid back to rest and slowly count to relax our bodies.  The children love yoga and it is proven to be a great practice to teach children early on to manage stress and to care for their mental as well as physical health.  The earlier this practice starts the better off long term.

What's coming up?

We come back from spring break on Monday, April 3rd but will NOT have preschool on Wednesday, April 5th as the high schoolers will be taking the SAT.  We WILL have preschool on Friday, April 7th however.

The theme for April 3rd and 7th will be Medieval Times.  We are very excited to talk about knights and dragons and kings and queens.

The week of April 10th we will be talking about spring and will have school Monday the 10th and Wednesday the 12th but there is not school Friday the 14th due to a non-attendance day.

Don't forget we have all of our preschool dates on our calendar located on our website and this blog (to the right) and they have been sent home as well.  This coming week we will send home another copy of the April and May dates for parents too.