Our PreSchool Blog

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.

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.

We are using the dinosaur theme to incorporate fine motor skills, sorting, matching, position words, and more. We have read several dinosaur books including Dini the Dinosaur, we have learned dinosaurn fingerplays, and danced to Laurie Berkner’s We are the Dinosaurs. Toddlers are learning through play!

In our fifth 2-3 year old summer playdate series, Dinosaur Playdate, we had so much fun spending the week imagining a time when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. We got to dance around to one of our favorite tunes, “We Are the Dinosaurs”, with Ms. Joanie, on Music Monday. We also used dinosaur mats for our friends to practice using tweezers to place the pom pom on the coordinating color–excellent fine motor for our younger ones to practice their hand strength!

We also had different group time games, one of which was sorting different size dinosaurs into their correct bowl. The other game we played was a dinosaur shape matching game, which our friends loved, too!

Dinosaur crafts 🙂

For some science fun, we used warm water in squirt bottles to melt dinosaurs out of their frozen ice eggs! The ice and water cooled us down on a hot summer morning, and they so enjoyed when they freed the dinosaurs!

On our party day, they got to decorate their own cupcakes with different types of candies and sprinkles, then they dug right in!

Our first week in Preschool Prep has been a blast! We have been learning our way around the classroom, playing with new centers and meeting new friends!