On Wednesday, our local firefighters came to visit our school and teach us about fire safety. We were able to see how a firefighter looks wearing all their gear, and the tools they use to put fires out. We were also able to give the fire department a special treat to thank them for all they do to keep us safe!
We have been reading books from the amazing author, Mo Willems. There is so much we have learned from his writing and illustration techniques. We learned about speech bubbles, he uses them often in his texts. Another point of focus has been on Willems use exclamation points. When there is an exclamation point at the end of a sentence he makes the text really big. Or when a character is trying to be quiet, he makes the text much smaller. This small technique portrays a ton of emotions, especially to our young readers. They can tell that the character is really mad or excited if the text takes up the whole page, or they can tell if the character is sad if the text is written in a much tinier font.
Another major focus was the life lesson of friendships, how to be a friend and what that looks like. Willems role plays the thoughts and speech of friends throughout his books.
Mo Willems can also get a little sneaky with his techniques, when reading some of his literature that isn’t in the Pigeon Collection, sometimes if you look really closely you can find the Pigeon hanging out in some of his other books.
Each pic below is of each student with their favorite Mo Willems book!
Baking in the toddler classroom is a fun way to learn through our senses. We made simple pumpkin muffins with mini chocolate chips. The toddlers used their eyes and noses to experience the orange pumpkin that we added to our batter. We put together all the ingredients to a big plastic bag and took turns “mixing”. Each child took a turn scooping a teaspoon of mini chocolate chips. The result: yummy pumpkin muffins for snack!
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 preschool we continue to enjoy working our way through the alphabet. For the letter Ee we made Elmer the Elephant, and played Eye Spy. What fun!
An invitation to play is arranging the environment so that it “invites” young children to come to an area in the classroom to explore, investigate, question, examine, participate, touch, feel, and manipulate through as much independent play as the materials can possibly allow. It can offer children the opportunity to direct their own play, follow their interests, learn more about the world around them, express themselves creatively and use their imagination to extend upon the initial invitation.
For our dinosaur unit this month we have combined invitations to play, invitations to create, whole group manipulatives, crafts, books, songs, and much more to engage our young learners.
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
Creative Tots has specialized in the private education of both toddlers and preschool age children for over 15 years. We began in the heart of Madeira and now also have a new Mason location. We are specifically designed to focus on early childhood development for children ages 18 months to 5 years.
Click below to learn more about our program offerings:
