Our PreSchool Blog

The K prep class completed their nocturnal animals of the forest study!  The last animal we explored was the mysterious and often times misunderstood bat.  We read a variety of books about the bat to learn about the unique characteristics of this amazing creature.

We learned one way mamma bat identifies her pups is through her sense of smell.  We tested our own sense of smell by trying to find our own bat babies with the same scent as ours!  It was harder than we thought, we discovered that a bat must have an amazing sense of smell.

After identifying our bat pups we learned about the parts of a bat, wrote them and labeled them!

After learning about the bat’s unique characteristics we worked hard to read about them independently…then helped out the illustrator and added interesting details!

We wrapped up our bat unit with a special Wild Kratts episode all about our new friend, the bat!

We read the story “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury this week and preschool and we had a GREAT time!  When the preschoolers showed up for school they walked into a surprise obstacle course and they were all so excited to see what we were doing!  We read the story and then in order to practice our story retelling skills, we went on our own bear hunt and experienced all the parts of the story while searching for the bear with our binoculars!

We went through the long swishy grass!

We went through the cold river!

Then we had to climb through the oozy mud!

And into the dark forest!

Through the swirling whirling snowstorm!

And finally into the dark narrow cave where we found….

The bear!!!!

Counting, color matching, prewriting, fine motor and more!

One of the themes this month in our classroom is the farm. We read “Eye Spy On The Farm” and retold the story using animal masks!

While learning about Fall and the farm, we are learning all about the different animals you find on a farm! Below you can see some of our farm animal activities we have been doing in our small groups.

Matching is a great mathematical skill for our toddlers to practice. We also talk about big and little, so we practiced matching the big farm animals to the little farm animals!

Name recognition! Although name recognition is an advanced skill for most toddlers, we try and incorporate ways in which they can start to recognize their own name. In this activity, they put their name under which farm animal they like the most!

Farm gross motor movement! We used our die with inserts to play a fun game that also practices listening, following directions, and taking turns. You could roll like a pig in the mud, flap your wings like a chick, gallop like a horse, etcetera.

And we always like to sneak in some fine motor practice using stickers 🙂

Stay tuned for some Fall and Thanksgiving fun from the end of this week and next week!

The month of November is all about the farm! We have different centers that reflect our farm theme, such as the Farmer’s Market center, to the art center where they stuck cotton balls on a sheep! Below you can see some of our November centers and activities.

Stringing farm animals for some good fine motor practice

Learning the colors of these farm animals and the noises they make

Farmer’s Market, where they sort the fruits and vegetables by color into their baskets

Playing pretend with our new farm and farm animals

Farm Train Table

Farm animal manipulatives

And, always the favorite–our farm animal sensory bin with a corn kernel base!

Sticking cotton balls to our sticky sheep at the art center

We continued our animal exploration during reading groups this week as we reviewed many of the sight words we have been studying.  Do You Eat Grass? by Bruce Larkin is one of the many Bruce Larkin readers we use during reading groups throughout the school year that helps our young readers develop the skills they need to blossom into independent readers.

We have been learning all about the nocturnal animals of the forests.  Today we learned that there are insects that are nocturnal, too!  We learned about the characteristics that make an insect and insect (head, thorax, abdomen, 2 eyes, 6 legs, and antennae) and about a special insect that sings songs throughout the night forest.  After reading The Very Quiet Cricket by Eric Carle, we used play dough to make our own insects with all the parts!

As the Halloween season has comes to an end, and we head into Thanksgiving and our Farm theme, we wanted to share some of the fun Halloween-inspired activities we did in the toddler classroom!

First we practiced some of our math skills, by matching different colored/patterned ghosts!

We then practiced sorting colors using different colored Legos. Our toddlers had to pick a colored Lego from the Mystery Can and feed it to the monster it matched!

Building letters using Candy Corn!

Counting practice: 5 Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate!