Our PreSchool Blog

Take a look at what your little one is learning by playing in our classroom centers this month!

When children build at the Block Center they explore with their imagination while recreating ‘The First Thanksgiving’. Preschoolers enjoy peer interaction through parallel play or socializing and creating with a classmate.

While exploring at the Sensory Tub children exercise problem solving skills, natural curiosity, and teamwork. Preschoolers connect real world materials with experience and senses while developing and understanding of volume and capacity. Pouring, scooping, sifting, and digging strengthen fine motor muscles as well.

Independence is the main skilled fostered at the Practical Life Skills Center. Preschoolers strengthen fine motor muscles while practicing every day life tasks such as buttoning and zipping or pouring and scrubbing vegetables. They develop hand-eye coordination and other similar skills needed as handwriting foundation. These skills will promote confidence as your little takes over more responsibility with self-help skills.

At the Light Table, children discover concepts of shape, size and spatial awareness. They exhibit motor control, coordination, and balance. Preschoolers imagine and create together at this center.

Paging through picture books in the classroom Library gives children the opportunity to tell their own story. Exposure to different types of print sparks a love for literature. “Reading” books at any age helps with comprehension even just by looking at the pictures. Letter recognition, letter sounds and the association between both concepts are developed while exploring books.

The Art Center is the place to express creativity and build a sense of accomplishment. Open-ended art activities give preschoolers the chance to explore their interests and create masterpieces all by themselves. Fine motor and planning skills are key concepts at this center. I know many of you are benefitting from beautiful, hand-crafted jewelry this month! 🙂

These are just some of our classroom centers. Ask you preschooler about their favorite center and see what they discovered playing at school!

As we complete our unit on letter recognition and sound review this month we are focusing on matching lowercase letters to pictures with corresponding initial sounds.   The ability to understand the structure of spoken language plays a crucial part in reading success now and in the future.  It is very important for children to automatically be able to manipulate sounds in words (phonemic awareness) so that comprehension is the focus of reading rather than decoding unknown words.  We develop phonemic awareness (ability to  manipulate sounds in words) through a variety of consistent and age appropriate activities in which children are asked to recognize and manipulate sounds.

We focused on beginning sounds during our phonics study today.  We popped a sound and found a picture that started with that sound.  First person to cover the board was the winner!

The importance of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction for beginning readers has received wide support among reading researchers.  When young children participate in specific instruction in how to identify and manipulate the sounds of language (phonemic awareness) and how to associate those sounds with letters and letter patterns (phonics), children are very likely to succeed in reading.  Skill at decoding, or sounding out unfamiliar words, is so critical for skilled reading that neither instruction instruction in sight word reading nor strategies in the use of context can compensate for poor decoding skills.  Decoding skills are considered an essential for fluent reading in later grades.  We begin this journey in our pre-k program to create a solid foundation in early phonics for your child to build on as they continue their path to becoming fluent readers.

Young children learn through moving!  Each day during group time, we Lettercise together to practice our ability to hear and identify letter sounds (phonemic awareness).  Lettercise is a song by Dr Jean.  Dr Jean creates a wide variety of songs that teach both literacy and math!  If you want to Lettercise at home, you can find her CD here.  If you would like to hear the song, click on the first photo below.  We don’t use the video that it is linked to, we just use the song.  Get up and Lettercise!

We used our magic hat today during phonics study.  We took turns choosing lowercase letters out of the hat, identifying the letter and sound, and matching it to its corresponding uppercase form.  We had so much fun!!