Our PreSchool Blog

Our little learners reviewed all of the shapes they’ve learned throughout the year with some hands on shape activities. One was finding the bug hiding under the shapes. They had to pick the shape I asked them to find and see if the bug was hiding underneath it! They also matched shapes to the underwater animal puzzles. We finished off with a shape collage. We glued each shape one by one as a group.

We finished off our alphabet with some letter Z activities. Zoo is for Zoo animals–washing zoo animals! We also did a Z is for Zipper activity. Each student picked a pouch with a zipper and found what was inside and then sorted the surprise inside by color!

We were busy bugs in the Studio Toddler classroom in April! We learned about how plants grow, made our own name gardens and played in garden sensory bins for some hands on learning. We also sorted bugs by color and made our own bugs in a jar craft using buttons and coloring grass for the bugs!

During the month of March we studied the weather and rainbows. We talked about how clouds are formed and did a science experiment to learn how rain falls from the clouds. Then we did a rainy day art project and talked about what we liked to do on rainy days. A lot of our little learners said they liked to jump in puddles. We did a pretend puddle jump and jumped on puddles with different letters on them!

For St. Patty’s Day activities we talked about rainbows and the order of the colors of the rainbow. We also did a shamrock letter match. The students used stickers with letters on them and matched them to stickers on their shamrock.

We had a colorful time studying the rainbow during the month of March. Check out some of our rainbow activities below:

Cereal color sort

Ribbon Rainbows!

Rainbow watercolor name painting

Finally, a rainbow obstacle course for some indoor recess!

To celebrate St. Patty’s Day, we made shamrock wands and talked about the color green

We made our letter V is for Vase letter craft and during whole group we sorted flowers by color and put them in a vase of our own!

March was not only about the color green, but we also studied the rainbow! We talked about how a rainbow is made and which colors make up the rainbow. Below you can see all of the rainbow color sorting we did! Sorting by color is a skill we incorporate a lot with our toddler learners. It practices color recognition and matching.

Some of the toys in our centers and sensory bins were also rainbow-themed. We love to see them learning through play!

Of course we had to do some rainbow art projects. We read the book “What Makes a Rainbow” by Betty Schwartz and then made our own rainbow using ribbon and a fluffy cloud. This was a challenging art project for our little learners and they did an excellent job with it!

Some other rainbow art projects:

Below you can check out pictures of our Valentine’s Day pajama party we had in the Studio class! We passed out Valentine’s to each of our friends, decorated + ate cookies, played in sensory bins, and sang + danced to some Valentine’s Day music! You could feel the love. 🙂

February was all about things that “go”! We learned about trains, cars, boats and airplanes. We created fun crafts around those different modes of transportation. Some of the crafts focused on color or name recognition, while others focused on fine motor skills, such as using stickers or tape to decorate cars and roads! Following directions is also something we practice at each small group time. Check out below some of our learners hard at work, creating!

Name trains:

Creating Cars + Roads:

Name planes! (names redacted for safety reasons 🙂 )

Transportation sort: Air, Land, or Water?

Hands on car activities! Driving our cars on a “road”, washing our cars, and parking our cars in their colored parking lots!

We have had a great January so far. Below are some of the activities we have been doing in our class this month!

We love making art that can tie into our letter of the week, building on our motor skills, and/or practicing using our different art materials such as a glue stick, holding a paint brush properly, or practicing safe scissor skills. Sometimes we do free art, and sometimes we do art in which our preschool prep learners are following step by step directions.

We also like to use items in our art to make for a different sensory experience. We painted with legos to reinforce our shape of the month, rectangle, to make an igloo. We also used white paint to reinforce our color, too! We used oranges to paint with the color orange, because orange begins with the letter “O”.

N is for Noodles + Numbers! We had a fun sensory bin using colored noodles and talked about the different characteristics of the noodles. Were they warm or cold? What colors were they? Did they feel slimy, sticky, dry? We also went on a number scavenger hunt in our classroom!

We worked on art projects that reflected our theme of winter + hit on our objectives. We talked about how the snowman has a top, middle, and bottom. We built a snowman on our felt board as a whole group and then we reinforced that concept by letting them make their own snowman craft with a top, middle, and bottom!

Small group activities help our students to learn our different focuses for the month, as well as taking turns and following directions.

We did a sensory study with hot and cold. We sorted hot and cold items on our magnet board. We then had hot chocolate with cold whipped cream (and marshmallows of course 🙂 ) We then made our own hot chocolate craft

The Studio Toddler class has really gotten into a rhythm in our classroom. Our toddlers are anticipating our daily schedule and following routines well. They’ve also been practicing sitting and doing crafts at our tables. This usually involves following directions, which is a skill we practice all year long in the toddler class! Check out some of the crafts we’ve been making so far below.

C is for Cat:

My 5 Senses Craft:

D is for Donut: