Our PreSchool Blog

We have been learning about the square for our shape this month. We try to incorporate the shape into our centers, with a craft, and with hands-on activities. This helps reiterate the shape in different capacities. For example, our little learners can learn through hands on manipulation of the shape, as well as learning to sight the shape by finding different items throughout our classroom that are square.

Going along with our monster theme, we invited the toddlers to create monsters by having monster bodies behind contact paper, and then sitting out monster eyes, mouths, horns, arms, etcetera for them to create their own monster. It is an activity to help foster their creativity and imaginations in open-ended ways. It is also good fine motor practice, with the toddlers having to peel the pieces back off of the contact paper. Check out some of our students creating below:

Head to the dino washing station to scrub some dinosaur scales! We had fun in our discovery bins washing the dinosaurs. We use our discovery bins to provide different sensory experiences for our little learners to explore.

We also sorted dinosaurs by color, matching the color of the dinosaur to the bowl.

In the Preschool Prep classroom, we have been meeting with monsters! We counted eyes onto monsters, fed Legos to Lego monsters, and we fed an alphabet monster!

We used a die with numbers on it for extra number recognition, and whichever number came up, that was the number of eyes that the students counted onto their monster.

Lego Monsters only like to eat Legos that match them!

Marvin the Alphabet Monster loves to eat letters! You have to tell him the sound they make before you feed them to him though 😉

You can also see some of the process behind our blow art monsters 

In our preschool prep class this school year, we will be doing many different art projects. Some of them will be processed-focused, letting them make art at their own pace and with their own creativity. Others will be product-focused, teaching our students to follow instructions to reach an end goal. These types of projects usually will focus on our color, letter, or shape of the month. Below you can see some of our product-focused art projects we did last week!

Yellow Lemon Prints

The Studio Toddler class has done such a wonderful job adjusting to their new routine and getting to know their friends and classroom. We have several different centers that our students can play in during their free choice time, as well as table activities that relate to our monthly objectives. See some of their exploring in the photos below!

Table Activity: Yellow Playdough

Sensory Station

Trains and Transportation

Home living/Dramatic Play

Playground Adventures

While our friends are still getting used to our classroom environment, we have been pulling students on an individual basis to do art projects. When we start learning our small group routine, these will be some of the types of projects we will complete in small groups, and some we will still work on individually with each student.

“A is for Alligator” letter craft

Yellow Lemon Print Craft

“S” is for “Skittles”! We built our letter “S” with skittles to use as a new item to practice our pre-writing skills. They all did a great job and got to eat a couple of the non-handled skittles 😊

We worked on fine motor skills by beading the different colors of the rainbow onto pipe cleaners to make a rainbow bracelet!

Happy Valentine’s Day 2019!

Happy Valentine’s Day 2019!

Learning patterns is a crucial foundational math skill upon which many other mathematical concepts are built on. Our preschool prep class has begun patterning and did such a great job!

We started with the basic concept of extending a pattern similar to ABABA… and they were to add what comes next. We will continue to work on patterns such as AABBAA… and work our way into even trickier patterns by the end of the month 🙂

The Studio Toddler class helped to make white play-dough that we will be using throughout the month of January for various activities.

We practiced following directions and taking turns to help mix the ingredients together. We also talked about what other things in our world are white. Not surprisingly, snow was the most popular answer 🙂

Using different tools to do art projects is something we love to do in our classroom! Our little learners got to jingle and shake a box to paint their Christmas tree our color of the month—green! We also sang “Jingle Bells” while we were shaking 🙂