Our PreSchool Blog

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!

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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! 🙂

We had fun learning about different farm animals! We listened to the sounds they make, their colors, and sorted between the big animals and little animals. In art, we did “H” is for “horse” and put cotton balls onto sticky paper to make fluffy sheep. We also cleaned our animals with toothbrushes and sponges to practice fine motor skills.

For the month of November, we will be focusing on the use of our five senses: touch, taste, sight, smell, and sound. Early education focuses a lot of learning through sensory play and active learning because our senses are some of our most useful learning tools! It is important for toddlers to continue to develop their different senses, as well as to learn the use of their senses, because that is their means of processing the world around them. Use of the five senses can help children link their senses to recalling memories, which helps with overall cognitive development.

With our toddlers, we made pumpkin muffins as a class, and we used our senses to explore what we were making along the way. Here goes some multi-sensory learning!

Ms. Kristen had some already made muffins in the Mystery Can, and our friends listened to the sound it made in the can. We then started making our muffins, by adding each ingredient in a big plastic bag, one step at a time. Our friends got to smell each ingredient we were adding (yum, cinnamon!) throughout the process.

After adding all of our ingredients, it was time to mix the batter together. Each of our friends got to take a turn (yay, sharing!) mixing our muffin batter in the bag. They loved how squishy and soft it felt!

After putting the batter into the pan, our friends got to add their own chocolate chips on top–we always love to sneak in some fine motor skills 😉

They used their sense of taste at snack time, when they got to enjoy what they helped make!

To celebrate Halloween this week, we had all Halloween-themed activities! We did Halloween art projects, played Halloween games, had spooky snacks, and of course–COSTUMES! We had so much fun celebrating Halloween with our friends. Have a safe and happy Halloween, from the Creative Tots Toddler Room!

Color recognition is a skill that uses the cognitive function, which is what our brains use to think, reason, and remember. Through cognitive reasoning, children link visual clues, such as colors, to the word it corresponds to, which is recalled from the use of their cognitive function.

The toddlers have been learning all about the color green this month! We incorporated the color green into lots of activities this week, for them to have the continual to exposure to one color, in which they can link to the word, “green”. They went on a hunt for the color green, used green markers, crayons, chalk, and paint, to create different artwork, and used green circles and triangles to sort shapes! Our friends sure made green week fun!

Knowledge of positions is essential as children communicate in the classroom and in the real world. Young children are in a period of rapid language growth and knowledge of positional words such as above, below, inside, outside, right, and left enhances their ability to follow and give directions and to use language precisely. We practiced these language skills today using our fun tunnel! We climbed in, crawled through and came out! Simple, playful, fun activities can be wonderful learning opportunities!

They told us when they were in the tunnel and told us when they came out…Learning is so fun!

Our toddlers have had a lot of practice with triangles so far this month. Because we know how important repetition is in order for our toddlers to learn, we incorporated triangles into most of our daily activities! Below you can see how we implement the triangle into different parts of our day.

At our art center our friends practiced sticking tissue paper triangles onto contact paper on our easel. 

In one of our small groups we practiced using a glue stick to paste triangles on a bigger triangle and made a triangle mosaic. We also used triangle sponges to paint triangles onto our triangle paper. In the other small group, we made triangles, using popsicle sticks, and practiced counting the 3 sides.

Our toddler friends practiced using a glue stick again in their art project with Ms. Kristen! They made owls using the triangle, too!

We even used snack time to practice making triangles with pretzel rods! 

Each week we focus on a new letter, and then use it in our daily activities. We learn about our letter of the week during small group time, such as what it looks like and how it sounds, and then implement the letter into our daily activities. Because repetition is a crucial part of a toddlers’ learning, we then use our letter of the week in our morning activity tables and even for art projects!