Hut, hut, Thanks!

This week we got ready for a Thankful break to gather with friends and family and maybe enjoy some sports too.  We talked about where we would be going over Thanksgiving break and what foods we like to eat and who we might be able to see and play with over the next week we will be off of school.  We hope everyone enjoys some time together this coming week and look forward to seeing you and hearing all about it when we come back November 26th.

In the Pirate Pete Preschool Program we pride ourselves on the relationships we establish with the children in our school.  We love the conversations about likes and dislikes, interests and not and to see their talents!  We have amazing children and teachers in our program and we are the most thankful for these amazing experiences throughout the school year.

We are thankful for the amazing games we were able to play together this week as we worked on basketball number math reading numbers and adding the correct amount of basketballs to the page.  Some students worked on this assignment with soccer goals too.

We did some working out this week to gain progress as athletics by practicing our balance and agility by crawling over and under things and through hoops and jumping all to improve our athleticism.  

 To work on our spelling we gave each child a gym shoe puzzle made up of their first name cut into strips.  The children had to learn to put the letters of their name in sequential order thus assembling the gym shoe puzzle.  Many of our kiddos are getting better at writing the letters of their name but it is developmentally appropriate for them to write the letters all over the page and not understand the pre-reading skills of sequential order yet.  This type of fun activity helps them organize and understand the ordering process that is created by pre-reading skills.

The teachers brought out our stethoscopes this week to learn about how activity changes our heart beat.  We first found our heart beats and practiced finding the pace of our heartbeats all at once by patting the beat on our chests.  

Once we listened to our heartbeats we started doing various activities from yoga to obstacle courses and then listened to our hearts.  As we had listened to them before we asked the children if our heart beats were faster or slower than when we were at the circle time rug.  We learned our hearts beat faster.  

Then, we took a rest and everyone lay down on the floor and counted to 20 then looked for our hearts again to see how fast or slow they had gotten and learned that when we slowed down and took a rest our heartbeats slowed too.

Later in the week we learned more about the Olympics and sports within them.  We did a baking soda science experiment with the rings and used colored vinegar to spray them and make the white circles bubble and fizz as they changed color.  Baking soda is always a great investment for your home over breaks as is vinegar.  They are both inexpensive items that can bring hours of fun!

After writing some words related to sports and matching the words to objects that are used in those sports we moved on to other science experiments about sinking vs. floating.  

Using a ping pong ball and a small basketball toy we formed hypotheses about which ball would sink and which would float by decided what we thought would happen to a heavy ball and what would happen to the lighter ball.  Then we tested out the experiments.

Later we sorted and searched through lots of balls with everyones names on them to find balls specific to sports the teachers called out.  It was a lot of fun to watch them dig through the tiny ball pit and then come across the ball with their name and shout out they found their ball.

We used golf tees and marbles to try to balance the tiny marbles on the golf tees for fine motor skill development.  If you have a golfer in your house and your child is getting antsy this break, see if you can ask them to balance things in the house on the golf tee and show you what they find.

We enjoyed a classroom art project on Friday during the Palatine High School Artsapalooza using a variety of balls as we rolled them back and forth to one another.  Our artwork is awesome and will hang up in our room for the next few weeks!

What's Coming Up?

• Now that we have spring semester tuition we are getting ready for the holidays!  The room will be slowly transforming for the winter holidays.
  
• We will stomp back in to preschool on November 26th with a Back in time/Dinosaur theme.  Then to finish out the semester the last two weeks of school will have to do with winter and winter holidays.
  
• The Preschool Holiday party will be on Friday, December 14th.