Safe and Healthy Pirates

This week we matched up safety with more health units as a way to combat the colds chasing us at school while we also talked about being safe in our homes as well as the preschool.  We started out the week identifying images associated with safety like the police as well as the fire department.  

We looked for badges, handcuffs and hoses and what sounds are associated with those words.  We start focusing on the phonics for the first letter in the word and then move from there when appropriate for the individual child. Differentiation at it's best, the children work one on one with teachers on letter identification and phonics based on interest and need. 

After having some time with words we worked on some science by mixing colors (red and yellow) to create orange and then adding blue water spray to the 'fire' to make it disappear.  First the teachers modeled what to do then let the children loose to do it themselves at our tables. 

We read a story about a fire fighter and then made our own fire fighters on paper with a head, helmet and handprints with paint.  The children drew their own faces and a letter for their first name on the helmet.

After making fire fighter heads, we looked at his entire uniform and worked together to label parts of it.  As we did so we discussed what the purpose of each part of the uniform was used for in an emergency situation. 

Later we worked on making our own fire truck puzzles by coloring the truck and adding designs and then cutting on lines 1-10 to separate the image into strips.  This turned our fire engine into a puzzle with number clues to help us put it back together again.  By putting the numbers in sequential order we would be able to complete the puzzle correctly.

We worked on building stop lights and matching colored tissue paper with colored circles on a page.  We also worked on our fine motor skills by ripping up that tissue paper before gluing it down to the page.

After lots of stories this week, we were able to move around and get some of our muscles going by playing red light, green light across the room. 

By Friday this week we decided to also talk again about hygiene and keeping our bodies safe from germs.  Cold season has really been rough this year so the more we talk about staying healthy the better.  We started out the day talking about oral hygiene and brushing our teeth.  The children and teachers alike laughed as our horse helper opened up his mouth and spit!

We used a giant book to review body parts and how to keep them clean and then worked out some of our favorite yoga moves to keep our bodies strong too.

After getting our work outs finished, we went back to the topic of fire fighters and their exercises they might do to keep them strong enough to climb ladders to save the day.  We then painted fire coming out of a burning building then built ladders and added a fire fighter to climb the ladder and safe the people inside.

After art, we lined up to do a little stop, drop and roll to learn the correct way to do this and get the paper fire off our bodies.

What's Coming Up?

This coming week we will be spending time with Dr. Seuss and can't wait to read, read, read!Friday, March 2nd will be Fiesta del Sol at Palatine High School.  Feel free to check out the Palatine High School website for more details.

We love our school!

We love our school and it showed this week as we prepared lots and lots of items for Valentine's Day. We used hearts to make various creatures, bugs and animals.  The children had great ideas to make butterflies, bees, dinosaurs and more!

We asked the children questions about things they love and helped them write some of their answers too.  We learned the foods they love, toys they love and people they love this week through this activity and other class discussions.

Before we did our Valentine exchange on Wednesday, we decorated our bags for a little fine motor skill fun in order for them to tell their bag apart from the rest of the ones in the class.

Another way we worked on fine motor skills this week we ripped up paper using the pincher grasp in order to fill a heart.  If you have scrap paper in your home, this is something you can do as well instead of just throwing it out.  

Have your child rip the paper into pieces as small as possible and then throw it away.  Ripping paper uses the same muscles in their hands that using stickers or drawing do; so give it try!

For some of our math vocabulary this week we graphed colored treats to see which color we had the most of at our tables.  Building the vocabulary of a graph is just as valuable as the math skills involved in sorting.  

We are able to discuss words like "most" and "least" with them during graphing in a way that we do just putting things into piles.  Using graphs allows the children to visually see longer lines and reinforces "most" and "least" in a way other than counting.

We worked on making letters in a fun way using red and pink colored shaving cream to practice building the letters instead of worrying about how to hold a crayon or other writing utensil.  We do have a few children who do not like to get their hands 'dirty' so they used paint brushes but otherwise this activity helps the kids focus more on the shapes of the letters then how to hold the writing tool to make the letters.

We made goo this week with love using red glitter and small plastic hearts as well as clear glue to make it easier to see all the valentine colors.

We took a field trip to a place we love to visit this week; the gym!  The children played a variety of activities in stations like soccer, hula hoops, and yoga.

All of these activities are a ton of fun and loved by all our little pirates so we took some time to go do some physical activity they enjoy where they could be as loud and fast as they wanted.  

 We made some flower painting art this week as well with our hand prints.  Some of the children made the color brown and painted dirt with their flowers too and others who didn't want paint on their hands used a brush.  Many of them were not dry in time for them to bring home but they will come home next week to enjoy.

 For some Valentine's Day math we matched dots on a heart to the numeral that correlated with that number.  Some of our pirates loved this activity so much that they asked to take some of these hearts home.  One way this game is fun for kiddos is that they can play it on their own. 

The teachers cut the hearts apart in a variety of ways in order to help the kids self correct.  If they think the amount matches the number but the pieces do not 'fit' together then they know they need to try again.  Simple tricks like this help foster independence and encourage the kids to make mistakes and learn from them to find a solution.

We worked on understanding how letters need to be placed in a certain order to make words.  The children were given a paper with images related to Valentine's Day on them then worked on making the sounds the letters on the page made to figure out which pre-cut out letter needed to fit into the spot on the page.

We couldn't do this without the help of all of our teachers.  In a traditional preschool there would be about 1 teacher for every 7 or 8 children and activities like this would not be possible because it is such a one to one or one to two children activity.  However, having so many teachers to spread themselves out among the children makes doing more advanced activities like this possible.

We worked on cutting on lines this week with hearts by having the children cut on straight, curvy an zig zag lines.  As we 'broke' our hearts we were able to build these cutting skills up by using a smaller paper that would be easier to handle than a large sheet of paper.

What's Coming Up?

There is no school on Monday, February 19th.  We will see you for Safety Week on Wednesday, the 21st.

Preschool registration for next school year will be coming up mid-March.  Please spread the word as we will have only one preschool session for the year next year as well so we will once again only have 20 spots for the year and preschool will run on our current time schedule then too.