The world is a big, big place!

This was one sweet week as we learned how to make helado (ice cream) and played Lotería (a form of Mexican Bingo) as we talked about and 'visited' places all around the world!  

The children made pizza for a math game as we visited Italy and read numbers on paper plates then added pepperoni pieces that correlated to the number on the plate.  We then could talk about what pieces of pizza had more or less, the most or the least.  

Some of us also were able to put on our chef hats for art and create pizzas to share with our teachers and friends and enjoy them for some dramatic play.

We worked on spelling using Q-Tips instead of pencils, crayons or paint brushes and practiced the phonics with letters that make up words from other countries that mean hello.  We worked on learning vocabulary from around the world because many of us are fluent in other languages and it's fun to take the opportunity to learn from one another.  Our world is a big big place and we enjoy sharing parts of that big world with one another.  

We learned about the various famous buildings around the world as well and planned out some of our engineering skills as we rebuilt our versions of the Eiffel Tower, Pyramids, as well as famous bridges.

We played instruments and tried to recreate music we heard from other cultures and places around the world.  We made instruments this week like maracas and Chinese drums.

After making passports we traveled the world and played hopscotch (a game that originated in England) and as we traveled the hopscotch game we earned sticker stamps for our passports.  Activities like this help teach the vocabulary of what a Passport is; something that you bring with you when you travel that you can have stamped to keep track of places you visit. 

Not all places in the world have warm weather, in fact there are a lot of places other than Chicagoland that get snow.  So we made it snow in preschool this week as we performed a science experiment you are able to recreate at home with milk, baby oil/vegetable oil and Alka-seltzer.

The books this week taught us about what to do with a Rebozo, cooking fun with foods from various cultures, Chinese Dragons, and we looked at and talked about how different we look from one another and how one person's skin may look like chocolate cupcakes while another's looks like french toast.  The best part about Around the World Week is the varying differences we all have as well and searching for the similarities.  Respecting and encouraging learning about other people is the best gift we can provide your children and we are always so grateful you allow them to share parts of who they are with us and allow us to share who we are with them.

In Italy people eat a lot of pasta so we made some noodle necklaces with a variety of colors and types of pasta.  Some children got creative the started to wrap the string around the curling noodles and we ended up with amazing jewelry.  This jewelry then made us think of some of the amazingly beautiful jewelry from Africa and compared all the beautiful colors we created and noticed how similar they were to that country too. 

Native American culture also offers many beautifully colorful accessories and we noticed more so when we created Dream Catchers which will allow only good dreams to come through them at night and catch the bad dreams in the web to keep us sleeping soundly at home.

We learned that flags are different around the world and that they represent different things and countries with the colors and patterns and symbols they hold.  We then built our own flags on flag poles made out of pipe cleaners.

Besides the snow in places around the world we learned some places have more rain than others then made it rain in the classroom with our cloud and water color experiment.

We learned that elephants are a large part of some Indian cultures and many are decorated with lovely colors so we made our elephants look more celebrated by adding various colored items to them.  

Any of these small motor activities provide lots of work with fingers as well as color and shape identification, sorting, etc.  If Santa is looking for items to bring to the house this year stopping by Micheals, Hobby Lobby, the Dollar Tree or Lakeshore or any other arts and crafts selling location would be great places to buy random things for your child to create with at home over winter break.

Skirts from around the world come in all styles and folkloric skirts from Mexico are long and beautiful.  The children took a try at being fashion designers this week by decorating long sheets of paper then helping the teachers drape it around the teachers to be the models of their fabulous work.  Look out New York Fashion Week!

To end our our amazing week around the world one of our preschool teachers who is a competitive Irish Dancer taught our little pirates some moves!  We learned about volcanoes in Hawaii and enjoyed making some amazing stuff happen at the end of the day! 

What's Coming Up?

• Next week is a combo theme week, meaning we have a different fun filled theme each day.  Monday we will travel to Medieval Times and Wednesday we will go to the Wild West and Friday will be filled with all things Pirate (of course)!
  
• If you are not sending in your spring tuition please do so this coming week, we will be sending home statements to all people who have not sent in payment or made arrangements with Kris Stary for a payment schedule.  Remember that Morning preschool tuition is $200 and afternoon tuition is $150.  Thanks in advance.
  
• Don't forget the week of November 24th there will be no preschool, enjoy that Thanksgiving week at home with family.