Where in the world is Pirate Pete?

We spent our time learning all about the world in which Pirate Pete and our preschoolers live.  We learned words like town, state, country, continent and planet and are working on learning specific names of places in relation to ourselves.  The children have been learning about the various other ways people learn and live around the world too.  

We learned that people in other parts of the world eat different foods, wear different clothes and get water from different places; however they also can do these things just like we do.  The beauty of this week was to learn about and appreciate all of these differences.  What a boring world we would live in if we were all the same!

When we learned about China and the beautiful Chinese Dragons and other lovely symbols common in relation to China we made fish wind socks to hang in our room.  While we have been enjoying them, don't worry, they will head home soon!

We visited Mexico this week and learned about the traditions associated with pinatas!  The children all took turns hitting the pinata and then enjoyed collecting the prizes that burst from the fun! 

 We worked on pizza math with toppings and slices while learning pizza is more an American food than Italian.  The children had to read numbers and place corresponding pepperonis onto their pizzas.

 We learned that there are places in this world that we cannot get by car or foot alone and built airplanes to take us to a variety of places around the world.  

After building our planes we flew to the circle time rug to learn about various places around the world then would fly our planes around the room (world) and land back at the circle rug to learn about a new destination.  This imaginative play really sparked some great conversations and helped us learn more about some of the majestical sites in the world.

Speaking of the world, we looked at a variety of globes and maps and discussed what the green and blue represented.  Then, the children made globes at the tables as a team spreading around blue and green paint to represent our Earth and the water and land all around it.

 We played a flag matching game using images of flags around the world and asked the children to not only match them but to create patterns and sort them by which colors they had in common, etc.

We did more letter recognition this week by using our fingers to place dots of paint on the names of countries for a combo of art, small motor and reading.  The countries we spelled out and hung around the room represented all the various countries our families are from.

Since we had been talking a lot about flags and places around the world this week we also made our own flags to see the creativity our students could put into recreating a flag for the United States.  Some children still included stripes or stars while others kept up with red, white and/or blue and some made a totally new creation all for themselves.  We also were able to hang these around the classroom this week too.

What's Coming Up?

• This coming week we will be talking about Moms, Dads and Grandparents and how important they are to us.  We will be making a variety of things to share with these family members this week so we hope you enjoy them! 
  
• Don't forget our last week of preschool is the week of May 13th and graduation is in fact on THURSDAY, May 16th.  Please don't hesitate to email or text us with any questions.