Our PreSchool Blog

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  • Shaving Cream Writing

    How do you create a memorable experience?  By writing letters and numbers using shaving cream!  The boys and girls had an ooey gooey time using their pre-writing skills to create the letters Y, Z and T, along with numbers 2, 3 and 4.

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  • Counting T’s

    While introducing the letter T, the boys and girls practiced their counting and letter recognition.  We brainstormed words that begin with T: tooth, toe, ten and tire, just to name a few, then the children came up and found a specific number and assigned it to a letter T.  Practicing our double digit letter recognition proved to an excellent exercise!

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  • Exploring Our Classroom

    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.

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  • Lending a Helping Hand…and Mitten!

    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!

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    Picnik collage

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  • Mittens-Sorting/Graphing and Donating

    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!

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    Picnik collage

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  • What’s New in January?

    New centers means new ways to learn our letters, letter sounds, practice our numbers, one-to-one correspondence, patterning and shapes.  Today, the children learned how to play the new games and activities that are in our centers.  They were all eager to try something new!

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  • Getting back into the swing of things means reviewing old routines and practicing procedures.  For our small groups, the boys and girls learned new games and activities that are available to them in our centers.  Teaching them how the activities and games work ensures that the children are playing the game/activity the correctly, ultimately gaining the educational purpose it is designed for.  A new month means new centers, which means new ways to learn!

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  • Back in Action!

    Welcome back!!  It was great to see everyone’s smiling face back in action today!  To start the new year off, we introduce new center activities, along with a new January country: Greenland.  With a cold climate and lots of white to see,  the children have lots of opportunity to explore activities with letters, numbers and shapes that represent snow and ice.  In Ms. Leslie’s small group, we played “Flurries or Snowstorm?”  The children chose a number, then put the corresponding “snowflakes” onto our winter scene.  In Ms. Lori’s small group, she showed the children several ways to build a snowman: rolling balls using playdoh, stacking different sized circles, and tracing a snowman.  In Ms. Courtney’s small group, the children used “snow” to trace out the letters V, W and X.  We had a snowtastic day!

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  • Dream Snow

    Today we read Dream Snow by Eric Carle again. The children were very excited that they remembered the name of the Author.

    We discussed The Dream Snow Christmas Tree.

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    And then we made our own Christmas Tree.

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    The Farmers animals are named one, two, three, four, and five. We found our own animals and named them!

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  • Fingerplays

    Fingerplays help children to develop their cognitive small motor, memory, and language skills.

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    Fingerplays also offer a way to learn about poetry, which is an extremely valuable and delightful experience for children. The beauty of fingerplays is that they can either soothe and calm children or stimulate their intellect and imagination.

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