Our PreSchool Blog

We practiced counting and number recognition in a fun and tasty way! Yum!

Our preschoolers started working in their journals this week!  Each morning, we start our day with “Journal Time.”  Sometimes it is in their journals, other times it is a page that goes home.  It is either a prompted, independent learning activity or an open ended creation!  This week, we have been focusing on and reviewing colors.  Our focus color this month is yellow!  We talked about the letter it starts with and completed a coloring activity all about the color yellow!  Later this week we talked about our favorite colors and everyone got to practice using glue sticks for their first entry in their journals.

Later this week we talked about our favorite colors and everyone got to practice using glue sticks for their first entry in their journals.

We are getting into a groove here in preschool and we are loving getting to know all of our new students!  This week has been all about getting comfortable in our new classroom, learning where things are, how to use the clip system in our centers, and making new friends!  Today we talked about our favorite centers and the favorites are definitely the baby center, the tower, and the library!  We are having a lot of fun!  We also learned what a good listener looks like.  We read the story Howard B. Wigglebottom Learns to Listen and we had special helpers show us examples of what a good listener does and looks like!

Our Super Heroes taking a much needed break from crime fighting for a Kona Ice

We had fun this week celebrating Easter in Preschool!  We went on a Easter egg hunt around our classroom and found eggs filled with letters.  For each letter, we named it, said the sound it made, and a word that started with that letter!

We made an Easter Chick art project!

We also played The Easter Egg Toss and we tossed an egg into a bowl with the letters we have been reviewing!  We had to name the letter, say the sound, and a word that started with it!

To practice our counting skills, we counted jelly beans up to ten and then got to eat them!!

And for some art exploration we painted with Easter eggs!  We had so much fun this week!

Yesterday we had a science visit from the Cincinnati Museum Center!  We got to learn all about insects and explore some fun activities as well as see and touch some very large Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches!

Each student got a bag of insect parts and we learned the names of the body parts and put our insects together!

We got to wear some silly glasses that made us look like bugs and allowed us to see a little like an insect would!

We got to explore with magnifying glasses and see some real insects that have been preserved as well as look at lots of pictures of different insects.

We even got to see and some of us even wanted to touch the Madagascar Hissing Cockroach! He was so big!

To explore more ways to paint, we got to paint with ice cubes last week!  It was a very fun activity and I think that quite a few of our students would have sat and done it all morning!

Teaching young children how to correctly grip a pencil can be a tricky task.  There are developmental stages with which one goes through when using writing utensils such as pencils, crayons, and markers and you may be seeing your child go through these stages this year!  The “Fisted Grip” is very typical early in the preschool school year and we rarely see this in our students at this point in the year.  That then moves into a finger grip which is still common through the winter months.  The early version of this is having a light finger grip at the top of the utensil.

With this, it is very hard to control the writing utensil and makes the children tired very quickly while writing.   Whenever we see this, we do our best to support the children by moving their hand down on the utensil and reminding them to rest the side of their hand on the table as they write.  Eventually this will become second nature to them!

One of the curriculum goals for preschool is to work towards what we call a tripod grip.  A tripod grip is where you use three fingers; your thumb, pointer, and middle finger to grip the writing tool.

This is considered the ideal grip with which you can move your hand accurately and efficiently.  Another piece to this grip is that your hand is low on the pencil and that it also rests on the table.  This is the best way to give your hand the most strength and allows you to write for extended period of time using straight lines instead of getting tired and having very light, squiggly lines.

We are beginning to see lots of low handed finger grips and even the tripod grips and we are so excited for this growth in your children!  You will see a lot of handwriting activities coming home with your children, as well as fine motor and hand strengthening activities posted on the blog as these are all skills that we use to work on this pencil grip and handwriting.  If they aren’t already, you will see your child beginning to write the letters in their name and our goal is for them to write their name independently by the end of the school year!!  They are getting ready to be able to write words and eventually even short sentences when they head to KPrep next year!