Our PreSchool Blog

Motor skills are movements and actions of the muscles. They are categorized in two groups: gross motor skills and fine motor skills. Gross motor skills generally refer to movements involving larger muscles, like those in the arms, legs, feet or the entire body (used for walking, jumping and so on). Fine motor skills generally refer to movements involving smaller muscles, like those in hands, wrists and fingers (such as those used for holding a crayon or toy). *

Play dough Improves Fine Motor Skills

Squishing, squeezing, stretching and molding play dough helps to build muscle strength in the fingers and hands. This in turn makes it easier to complete fine motor activities like holding a pencil and cutting with scissors later on.

Dancing improves Gross Motor Skills

Jumping, stretching, dancing and ribbon twirling helps build muscle strength throughout the entire body.  We also tapped wooden sticks to the tempo of Miss Joanie’s guitar, working on rhythm as we danced to “We are the Dinosaurs,” a classroom favorite!

* information taken from www.leapfrog.com

On Friday, we continued our “How We Go” transportation theme with HOT AIR BALLOONS! We read the book “Up, Up, Up”…Our question of the day was: “Which hot air balloon is your favorite?” {the blue hot air balloon got the most votes!} We do the question of the day to give the children a chance to interact during group…and I use it as a chance for them to recognize their names when I hold up their little person. “H-A-N-N-A-H…..who is H-A-N-N-A-H?” {“me!!!”} “Hannah, Which is your favorite hot air balloon?” This also gives the other children a chance to learn/practice their classmates’ names.

Next we talked about hot the air that is used to make a hot air balloon fly is HOT. Cold air is what makes it sink in the sky. I got a hair dryer and a grocery bag to demonstrate how the hot air blows into the balloon to inflate it, lifting it into the air.

In one of our small groups, the children decorated hot air balloons. They used their fine motor skills to glue tissue paper onto their “balloon.” In another group, we painted butcher paper with combs to make the hot air balloon basket. While we painted with combs, we practiced pre-writing words like “up”, “down”, “across”, “straight lines”, “curvy lines”, etc. This will help the children develop the vocabulary necessary for learning to write. {i.e. “Today we are making a ‘B’…it has a big straight line and two little curves.”}

Ms. Sarah

We were introduced to the Dung Beetle.  It lives in the Sahara Desert.

The Dung Beetle uses it’s hind legs to roll the ball into it’s burrow.

We watched the Dung Beetle in it’s habitat.

After we rolled the clay into balls, we pushed it down into the burrow.

This month we are studying the color yellow. Check out some of our fun yellow activities from today!

We started our day off with painting cars and trucks.

Check out our yellow discovery tubs!

 

This week we are learning about the letter B!

This month’s theme is transportation in the toddler room.

We had a transportation sensory tub full of vehicles, colored corn, road signs, stop lights and more!

We also worked on our fine motor skills with our car wash discovery tub!

 

 We are off to a great start in the Toddler Room!! We had so much fun exploring our school both inside and out.  Take a look to see what we’ve been up to.