Our PreSchool Blog

Today in small groups, we practiced the movements the children need to form different letters in the alphabet.  We worked on slanted, vertical and horizontal lines on our map of the forest.  Then, we had a chance to use our fun Magic Wipe Boards to practice writing our names!  They did a great job.  Writing with your child even at this young age is a wonderful activity to become more accustomed to holding the pencil/marker correctly and building the strength in the hands that is needed for more fluent writing in the future.  The best place to start is with the letters in their name!  There is also a wonderful series of prewriting and letter writing books by Kumon.  Click on the pictures below to view different books in this series.

Some Children Wrote their Name Independently

Practice Makes Perfect

Pencil Grip is Important!

“Following the Road”

I did it!

This week we have some creepy, crawly, colorful spiders in our sensory table. There are over 100 spiders hiding in the table and the children love searching for the small creatures. Once they’ve found a colorful spider they place it in the corresponding color bucket with the tongs. This spooky spider activity is great for a our fine motor skills!

Today in small groups we used our fine motor skills to string a bead pattern onto our halloween necklaces.  Fine motor muscles are very important small muscles located in your child’s hands that need to be developed in order to hold a pencil properly and attain the ability to write successfully and without difficulty.  Scissor activities also help build these muscles needed to write.  If you find your child having trouble holding scissors properly, holding a crayon or large marker incorrectly, small muscles activities are needed to help build the muscles.  We include these activities into our daily curriculum through scissor “skill” activities, prewriting activities, playdough activities, through the use of stickers (it takes these small muscles in the hand to peel the stickers off the paper), beading, and the use of tongs in the sensory tables and center games…etc.  Click on any of the pictures for other small motor activity ideas.  Have fun!

Reading My Pattern

I did it!

Checking My Work

Stringing a Pattern

supervised scissor practice is key to developing important fine motor skills

Today we continued to practice our scissors skills with our happy face jack-o-lanterns. The preschoolers were given a strip of orange card stock with six pumpkins to snip out. We talked about how to safely hold our scissors, where our fingers and thumbs should be positioned while we’re cutting, and how to effectively “open and close” our hands to manuever our scissors just right in order to make a clean cut. We practice our scissor skills regularly with many different cutting materials to keep the task fun and exciting. When the students were finished cutting out their happy jack-O-lanterns we glued them into their green pumpkin patches. Great development with such a simple activity!

play-dough sculptures

The kids had a wonderful time with play dough this morning!  They were using their creative minds to turn their play dough into many different things.  Morgan turned his play dough into a pair of glasses and Audrey made hers into a hat!

treasure hunting at the sensory table

This week we have added rice and colorful jewels to our sensory table!  The kids have loved feeling the texture of the rice and sorting through it to find the shiny and colorful jewels!  We had quite a crowd at the sensory table today scooping and dumping the rice over and over again!  The rice was used for many different things today.  Some kids were “building houses” while others were “cooking different foods.”  The jewels were also a big hit for finding “treasure” and talking about the different colors.

more cooking today, this time . . . pumpkin pie!

We made Pumpkin Pie in a bag today!  The children helped to measure and pour all of the ingredients into our special plastic bag.  The best part was that after we zipped up the bag, everyone had a turn to mush and mix everything together with their hands!  It was so exciting for them to see what it felt like as they were mixing the cold pumpkin pudding.  To make the crust of the pie, the kids also crushed up graham crackers on the table.

Today we practiced our developing scissor skills in Ms. Katie’s straw cutting/sorting activity.  The children had a ball cutting small bits of drinking straws and watching them shoot across the table…we didn’t know practicing our scissor skills could be so much fun!  Cutting is a wonderful activity to develop the small muscles in your child’s hand which is essential for writing.  For other small muscle activities just click the picture!

For more small muscle development skills activities click the picture above.

Mixing primary colors to produce secondary colors with the toddlers

The toddlers this week have been practicing their color recognition and experimenting with primary and secondary color mixing. It is a wonderful experience for the children to see how primary colors mix to form secondary colors. The objectives of these exercises are color recognition, the ability to demonstrate creative expression and creating fine motor development. This exercise is one of the favorites of the toddlers. They get to manipulate the different colored solutions in the ziplock bags without creating a mess!