How does your garden grow?

Spring is officially here and with that came another great Star of the Week presentation and lots and lots of eggs!  We talked about flowers, plants and all the eggs and new spring babies that are going to be appearing this time of year.  

For our pre-reading activity this week we did a lot of letter matching of capital and lower case letters on the halves of eggs together to build the egg showing both versions of A and a.

Bringing out the eggs this week set up a lot of excitement for the children as some of them talked about the egg hunts they enjoy doing this time of year and all the treats they like to find inside their eggs.

After a lot of egg activity, we took a break to plant our own gardens with Styrofoam bowls and pipe cleaners for stems.  Some children decorated the tops of the stems with tissue paper for flower petals and others wanted to just have plant stems in their gardens and decorated the base of their garden bowl.

We learned that bugs need to help us in our garden to get the flowers to grow.  We created caterpillars by adding beads to pipe cleaners and either making our caterpillars very colorful or patterned or one solid color.

After making caterpillars for our gardens we planted more flowers with strips of paper for stems and paper plates for the top of the flowers.  Some children chose to cut petals into the plate and some colored them while others glued all kinds of additional extra items to the flower tops.  We then 'planted' the flowers around the room to add to a variety of butterfly paintings to make our classroom ready for springtime.

 We had a lot of energy now with the weather changing to the warmer side so we sang a few springtime songs and danced a few springtime dances.  We made it rain in a storm this week with rhythm sticks and even just used our hands and feet to make sounds of thunder and rain as well during lots of circle time games and musical activities this week too.

We made more butterflies to hang from our ceiling out of coffee filters that we colored with markers then squirted with water to make a ty-dye color affect on the coffee filters.  Then, we sang a few more songs while they dried then went back to the tables to attach pipe cleaners for the body of the butterfly and hung them around our room with our flowers and egg baskets.  Some of the children asked to take their butterflies home but most of them are currently hanging in our rooms. 

 We made it rain inside jars this week a few times as a class as well as individually when the teachers added shaving cream to the top of water in a jar then dropped water color paint on top of the shaving cream 'filling' the cloud with 'moisture' to wait for it to 'rain' inside the jar.  This is one of our favorite science experiments to do and always an amazing thing to watch.

We read a lot of books about spring time, eggs, caterpillars, bugs, plants, flowers and gardens this week to learn more and build our vocabulary on this topic.  The books we have accessible to the children in the room change with the themes and many of them grabbed some of these books during free time this week to read over and over again.

We built a rainbow on Friday after talking about what happens in the sky after it rains by lining up cups of baking soda and water color paint to practice learning the colors and order of colors in a rainbow.  Then, the teachers poured vinegar over the cups to allow the foaming rainbow to appear. 

After making rainbows we worked on patterns with various spring related images like frogs, flowers, ducks, clouds, plants, etc.  The children working on cutting out the paper pieces at the bottom of a page and then worked to glue them in the correct blanks to complete the pattern lines.  Many of the children are doing amazing with their cutting and have shown terrific growth in this skill!  

 We made caterpillars using stickers as well as finger stamp marks this week too in our math activities where the children needed to add 2 stickers or stamps if their caterpillar said number 2 and 8 if it said 8, etc. 

Before heading home on Friday we went outside to burn off more energy and enjoy some Vitamin D with the sunshine.  We went on an egg hunt and were able to take home the eggs and stickers inside! 

What's Coming Up?

This week is SPRING BREAK!  We will resume school again Monday, April 2nd for career week.

Don't forget that Preschool Graduation is Wednesday, May 16th this year.  More details will follow as it gets closer.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

After hearing two wonderful Star of the Week presentations we jumped into St. Patrick's Day this week.  We learned about leprechauns and then made beards for them using our home made puffy paint which is a mixture of glue and shaving cream and then hung these up in our room to attract a leprechaun for good luck this week.

 After adding our leprechaun art to the room we did some rainbow math with dotted clouds and rainbows to match the images together to complete the entire rainbow curve.

We learned a wonderful Irish Jig for kids this week and danced it every day this week.  The teachers and children enjoyed it so much we did it over and over again!  Here is the link for you to enjoy it as well!

Monday we learned how much leprechauns enjoy the color green and began our mission to collect as much green as we could find in the room and fill up our cauldron to the top with anything green we could find.  It was amazing to see how excited the children were to hunt down this color as they looked in every nook and cranny of our room for it all. 

 We went on Irish adventures this week using balance beams and hula hoops to walk across and hop through acting as leprechauns on great adventures.  

 Later we made rainbows by sorting colored toys by color and assembling them into rainbows, then cut out rainbow colored shapes to match them to the spot on the leprechaun's hat and then got a work out going with Leprechaun yoga moves.

 We made a pot of gold with sparkling gold paint and our hand prints with rainbow colored paint.  Some of our children painted their own hands, others painted teacher hands and others traced their hands with crayons and colored them.  Whenever given a task like this we try to have as many choices for the children to make their art their own and avoid things looking like cookie cutter art to allow for creativity even during product art.  

 By Friday our Leprechaun left us all kinds of surprises!  We were given bottles of ingredients that caused an 'Irish Volcano' that fizzed and bubbled everywhere! 

Then, we got clues to go on an adventure around the building looking for the pot of gold and treasure, we were able to find it at in the corner of the hallway near our main office.  The children all got lots of gold and green coins as well as a piece of treasure.

But then, that tricky leprechaun made a mess of our room while we were gone looking for treasure and we had to clean up our classroom with toys thrown all over the floor, tables turned over and chairs upside down.  The children worked really well with one another to put all of the items away and got our room back into shape in no time.

We worked on sorting our big and small letters in pots of gold that were made for only gold coins that had capitol or lower case letters.  Sorting letters is a helpful reading strategy that builds the skills needed to put words together later during readings.

After sorting letters into their pots on Friday we used the magic paint the leprechaun left us that fizzed when we mixed the yellow and blue paints together.  As we worked to paint shamrocks we mixed those two colored paints together to watch them blend into the color green and bubble at the same time!  

 Many thanks to our guest Irish dancer this week as she demonstrated her talent of Irish dancing and showed us pictures of her fancy dance costumes.  Once she demonstrated the dance, she taught it to some of our brave preschoolers who wanted to try their hand at Irish dance too.  It was a very special treat and we were so grateful to have her come and help us out!

What's Coming Up?

We are FULL for the 2018-2019 preschool year; thanks to everyone for getting signed up and full within 36 hours this year!

Next week we will be learning about how our gardens grow as we talk about spring and the outdoors the week before spring break.

Spring break will be from March 24th - April 1st with school resuming Monday, April 2nd.