We are 100 Days Smarter!

Morning preschool is still making our way through the alphabet. We just finished working on the letter Oo, and are looking forward to celebrating Valentines with all our friends this week!

The toddlers are focusing on the letter P this week.  We discussed foods, animals, and colors that start with the letter P.  We love that pizza starts with P so we turned our room into a pizzeria.  I read the story  Secret Pizza Party then we each made our own pizza using fine motor skills to add sauce, mozzarella, and pepperoni.  The toddlers sang a pizza song and added paper cheese and pepperoni to a P for our letter craft while we waited for pizzas to cook.  A yummy lesson!

Ms. Joanie is such a fun part of the Creative Tots family.  She comes once a week with her engaging attitude and happy disposition.  Ms. Joanie often plays her guitar, drum,  shaker eggs, or bells.  The children think it is hilarious when Elmo makes a guest visit.  The children listen intently as Joanie teaches the parts of her guitar, breathing exercises, and music terms.  The toddlers love to join in singing classics like “Wheels on the Bus” and “Twinkle Twinkle” but Ms. Joanie is always teaching us a new song.  Ms. Joanie will join us for the Valentine’s parties in February so families will get to witness her infectious joy. 

The new year is off to a great start in morning preschool. We have been busy working on ‘Art Show’, the letter Mm, and of course – playing with snow!!

We are enjoying the wonders of winter and the color white through sensory experiences.  Sensory activities facilitate exploration and naturally encourage children to use scientific processes while they play, create, investigate and explore.

Shaving cream on the tables provided an interesting textured sensory activity.  It also provides an empty canvas to practice drawing shapes, letters, and lines.

Our sensory bin and discovery tubs provided different textures and items to sort and pour.

Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice provided an activity to use all of our senses including taste!  We read the book, danced to the video with song by Carole King, and tasted chicken soup with rice!

Our pretend veterinary office has provided fun interaction and vocabulary.  The children love to pretend to take care of and feed the animals.

We create centers for sorting, exploring and sharing.  The month of January has been packed full of fun center exploration.

Along with our winter themed activities, we are learning about “responsibility”. To help teach this, the students each have a classroom job they are responsible for weekly! They have really taken ownership of these responsibilities. We are promoting independence and autonomy in the classroom!

Cutting icicles (we brought a real one in from outside to observe and touch)!

With all of the snow and cold weather we received this week, we could not go outside for recess…this meant we had to bring some snow inside! We painted snow, and made “Mr. Potato Head” snow people!

We had to get some wiggles out with some parachute fun!

We learned all about the polar bear this week! We based many of our activities around this animal. The students fed and counted fish into a polar bear’s mouth, made polar bear puppets and learned about how the polar bear camouflages with its surroundings. The kids took turns camouflaging a toy polar bear with other white objects around the room, as the animal would in its arctic habitat.