Food and Nutrition

Our week was cut short with a snow day on Friday but leading up to that we did a lot of exciting activities learning all about food and nutrition.  

After hearing from our Star of the Week on Monday we jumped into our first pre-reading activity with strawberries and the letter S.  The children working on fine motor skills while they cut out strawberries and then glued them on the line used to make an S and practice recognizing the shape of an S and the sound it makes when saying the word strawberry.

 

After we worked on the letter S we sorted fruits into piles by type and then created fruit patterns with them as well.  We counted how many of each type of fruit we had at our table and then talked about which amount was the most and which was the least.

After math we learned about the germs certain foods can place on our teeth and worked on brushing them to remove the germs and keep our teeth clean.  This is always a favorite game to play with the children and the teachers often are asked to keep adding 'germs' so they can keep playing.  

How do we play? We printed large mouths and had them laminated then color on the teeth with dry erase markers.  Then, the children take actual tooth brushes and scrub and scrub until all the marker (germs) are gone.

After snack we worked on sorting fruits and vegetables in groups and hung these in our preschool to remind us this week what foods count in the vegetable group and which ones count in the fruit group.

We learned about the grains group by cutting up real spaghetti in a fun and silly way to improve our cutting skills.  Teachers colored real spaghetti noodles and passed out gloves to wear to hold the noodles in one hand and the scissors in the other hand and cut the noodles smaller and smaller on their plates.  The children couldn't get enough of this and played with the noodles and scissors for a long time.

 We worked on our writing and letters more this week during free play with our white boards and watching the children draw pictures as well as letter and shapes and numbers.  All of these work the same parts of the hand so they all help to build these skills.

After story time we worked more on letter recognition by cutting out letters on one page and finding their match to glue them down on another page; spelling words.  Some of the children can get all of the words done while others make it through one or so.  This is an example of differentiation.  Different children have different interests and skill sets in cutting, gluing as well as letter recognition.  With activities like this each child is able to work on different skills to suit their individual developmental needs.

Sometimes we have time to do activities like this with differentiation and other times activities are more suited to have everyone do the same thing at the same time.  We watched a teacher demonstrate how to make ice cream and then headed to the tables to recreate that experiment in order to make our own ice cream in groups at the tables.  

We added ingredients and shook them in baggies, taking turns at the tables to give our arms a break from the shaking and watched the liquid thicken.  

 After trying our science experiment we moved around a while and got some exercise as we talked about the balance between healthy foods and exercise too.

Once we were done with our workouts we made some math pies.  We got pie crusts with numbers written on them and added colored pom pons (berries) to make fruit pies.  Some children had green pom pons to make lime pies while others had yellow for lemon and red or pink for strawberry.  Lots of imagination with this short math game!

 Before heading home on Wednesday we fed a 'frog' healthy foods and threw the unhealthy foods away.  During this activity the children were given play food and made the choice to feed the frog or not.  This was our way of checking for understanding of what foods can be eaten any time and what foods can only be eaten sometimes.

What's Coming Up?

This coming week we will be talking about Valentine's Day!  Lots of talk of love and hearts, etc.  We will do a Valentine exchange on Wednesday right before we head home for the day.  Please remember we DO NOT need you to write names on the valentines, this is just to teach the concept of an exchange, not a reading activity.  

We also want to remind you that we WILL NOT HAVE SCHOOL Friday, February 16th due to a 1/2 day of school as Palatine High School hosts the State Gymnastics meet.  Feel free to come to PHS and check that out Friday night or Saturday.  It's always a great time!

Monday, February 19th is President's Day which means we will not have school that day.