February 2nd never goes unnoticed! Today, the children learned what a groundhog is, where it lives and who the most famous groundhog in the world is. After watching a video of Punxatawny Phil, the children made their very own groundhogs. We also worked on our cognition with groundhog concentration. Have you asked your child if Phil saw his shadow today?
A new month means new activities in our centers! The children had the opportunity to rotate around the centers to learn the new games and activities. Being able to do the activities properly ensures that the children are learning and practicing the skill the activity is meant to teach/reinforce.
As we usher in a new month, the children have the opportunity to discover new things in our centers. All of our centers have new items, but today we focused on the math, literacy and art centers. Learning how to do new activities is just one more way to practice/learn a skill in a different way.
Our fine motor skills are really shining through! The boys and girls did an excellent job getting those little fingers moving while practicing their cutting. Cutting out and decorating a mitten was a fun way to get those little muscles working!
Finding items that are equal in weight takes these scientists some trial and error. Using everyday items, the children made a hypothesis on which items are equal in size. If they are not equal, what can be added to help balance? The children became very creative in problem solving!
Today we had a special guest: Ms. Penny! ms. Penny made our classroom colorful by teaching the children about Franz Marc. Franz Marc was a German painter who contributed to the German Expressionist Movement. The boys and girls did a fantastic job drawing the outline of their picture, then using watercolors to make a beautiful masterpiece!
Today we made….you guessed it! Patterns! Using our pattern blocks, we created ABABAB patterns using shapes and colors. We also used pattern block templates to discover the shapes and how they work together. They also learned how to use simple objects at home to create a pattern.
With our mitten activity today, the children were eager to not only sort and graph our mittens, but talk about giving the mittens to boys and girls who need them. With so many mittens, the children did an excellent job of sorting them by color and graphing each one by categories: Does it have a design on it? Stripes? Is it a solid color? After sorting the mittens, we then decided which category had the most, and which has the least. We then took the category that had the most (the design category) and counted how many there were. We are so proud of how excited and eager the children were to donate to the children of First Step Home. A big thank you to all of you who brought in your generous mitten donations and for helping us teach your children such a valuable lesson!
Matching the upper and lowercase letters can be tricky, especially for the letters Ee, Dd and Rr (to name a few). Today, the children challenged their letter recognition skills while playing a letter matching memory game. This is a great way to quickly assess which letters your child knows, and which need more practice!
Walking through the door this morning, the children were talking about how they have mittens to give other kids who can’t buy there own. It is so heartwarming to hear three and four year old talking about the importance of giving to others. We started our mitten activity by reading The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. As we distributed mittens, the boys and girls sorted them by color. After that, we sorted them into three categories: stripes, solid color and design. Using an oversized graph, the children were graphing whizzes! To finish our graph, the children identified the category with the largest amount of mittens (the design category), and ordered the mittens from numbers one to eleven. We tried on a few different types of mittens, but we all decided it would be best to give to those in need! Thank you very much for all of your generous donations and for helping us teach your child the importance of giving back. We had mitten success!
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.
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