Our PreSchool Blog

The month of March is focused on the color purple. We made purple play-dough, painted with purple paint using oval cookie cutters, colored with purple crayons, stamped on purple paper, sorted different purple objects that we found around our classroom, and had a purple snack with purple grape juice! Purple party! We try to incorporate our monthly learning objectives (which you can find in the monthly newsletters) into each of our activities. You will also spy our shape of the month, which is oval, in our different centers and projects.

Our letter of the week was the letter “R” and we had fun making Rockets, using Red stickers to build the letter “r”, and we had Raisins for snack on an “R” placemat!

For the second half of February, keeping our monthly objectives in mind, we have been learning about outer space! We’ve read the book How to Catch a Star and have been learning about stars, planets, and space.

In one of our activities we used our imaginations in our learning to pretend that our different colored balls were “planets” from outer space going into a black hole–but look out! If you don’t sort the ball into the color that it matches, the black holes will “spit them out”!

Our discovery bins are space-themed, with rockets, aliens, stars, astronauts, and other sensory objects that the toddlers really enjoy to free play with.

We made our own galaxy! Our students learned to use the sides of paperless crayons to pinch between their fingers and rub along the paper, for a new way to color! They also loved adding star stickers to make it look like the night sky.

And what could be better than outer spaced themed snacks? 🙂

Thank you all for coming to our classroom to celebrate Valentine’s Day with us! We hope you enjoyed being there, as much as we loved having you all!

The month of February is all about the love. Our shape of the month (heart) and color of the month (pink) can be seen all around our classroom, and in the activities our toddler friends have been working on each day. We’ve even been practicing our gentle hugs to share with our friends. We are all feeling the love, and we can’t wait to celebrate Valentine’s Day with the toddler families on Thursday and Friday!

Some of our friends, checking out all of the snow outside 🙂

Some heart-shaped fun, with matching and counting!

We even played a Valentine version of “Duck, Duck, Goose”, saying “Heart, Heart, Valentine”, instead! This really helps them with listening skills, following directions, and taking turns. They also have a blast doing it!

What a sweet moment between two of our friends 🙂 ….

Happy Valentine’s Day!

We had a great month of January exploring with our winter color of “white”, in several different ways! One day, we made “snow” play-dough. Another day, our friends frosted a cookie, used chocolate covered raisins for eyes and noses, marshmallows for ears, and voilà, a polar bear cookie treat! Finally, a good sensory activity that our friends love is playing with shaving cream! The messier, the better!

Math is a part of your toddler’s schooling, even at their young age! Matching and sorting are two foundational math skills that your toddlers are learning to utilize just by observing the world around them. We have been practicing these math skills in school all year, and we wanted to show you different ways that we teach these skills in our classroom.

One tool we use with our toddlers is a color mat! We use different colored objects for them to sort onto the corresponding color on the mat. Recently, we used colored letters to sort onto the color mat–sneaking in letter sounds whenever we could 🙂

Going along with our January theme of “winter”, for matching skills practice, we took turns matching patterns on mittens in one of our small groups!

Now, maybe they’ll be able to help you find the match to your mismatched gloves/mittens at home! 😉

There is nothing better on a cold day than some warm and comforting soup! We read the book, “Chicken Soup with Rice” by Maurice Sendak, and then our friends helped make some chicken soup…with rice! They each took a turn adding in a different ingredient.

Our friends got to try chicken soup with rice, along with rectangle crackers at snack time!

Our art project was also focused on chicken soup with rice, so our friends used different colored rice and glue to make a bowl of pretty colored chicken soup with rice! They had fun using their fine motor skills to scoop the rice, pour it on the paper, and then shake it until it stuck to the glue.

We had such a fun holiday season with our friends in the toddler classroom! With holidays as our theme for the month of December, our activities were as fun and as festive as can be!

Here we were practicing our fine motor skills, by putting gumdrops onto straws and square toothpicks. Some of our friends made it more challenging by trying to stack as many as they could fit!

And we can’t forget about our different holiday art projects! Our friends did some painting with jingle bells to make candy cane stripes, painted using star cookie-cutters for Christmas tree ornaments. They also did alphabet projects about the letter “J” for Jingle Bells and “K” for Kiss under the mistletoe!

Our centers were focused around holiday happenings, too! We had Santa’s Workshop, red and green color sorting, Christmas tree pom-pom decorating, holiday puzzles, and our sensory table was filled with everything from jingle bells to cinnamon sticks!

It was truly a joyful and magical time of year with our friends in the toddler classroom. We are very thankful for such a wonderful ending to 2015, and look forward to what 2016 will bring for the Creative Tots toddler class!

The holidays are upon us, and nothing beats the different smells of the holiday season! Continuing on with our exploration of the five senses, we made no-cook peppermint play-dough during group time. Each of our friends took a turn pouring in a separate ingredient, making sure to smell some of them along the way, like our peppermint extract! They loved adding in the food coloring, making our play-dough red, which is our color of the month!

Although our peppermint play-dough smelled good enough to eat, we let them explore with their sense of taste at snacktime with a peppermint patty treat! Exploring with our senses is not only fun, but tasty, too! 🙂