Our PreSchool Blog

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.

The month of November is all about the farm! We have different centers that reflect our farm theme, such as the Farmer’s Market center, to the art center where they stuck cotton balls on a sheep! Below you can see some of our November centers and activities.

Stringing farm animals for some good fine motor practice

Learning the colors of these farm animals and the noises they make

Farmer’s Market, where they sort the fruits and vegetables by color into their baskets

Playing pretend with our new farm and farm animals

Farm Train Table

Farm animal manipulatives

And, always the favorite–our farm animal sensory bin with a corn kernel base!

Sticking cotton balls to our sticky sheep at the art center

We have been working hard this month on our addition math study unit…we have used many different manipulatives such as marbles and unifix cubes to learned the fundamentals of addition.  According to learning theory based on psychologist Jean Piaget’s research, children are active learners who master math concepts by progressing through three levels of knowledge–concrete, pictorial, and abstract. When children use manipulatives it allows them to explore addition at the concrete level. When students manipulate objects to solve addition problems, they are taking the first steps toward building understanding and internalizing math processes and procedures.  They will then use the base knowledge to develop more sophisticated problem-solving strategies in the future.

The manipulative center provides children with interesting materials to explore. Exploration is essential to the development of mathematical and logical thinking.  Gears along with other manipulatives in our center allow children to refine hand-eye coordination and visual perception.  Stacking, fitting connecting, stringing, comparing, matching, sorting, sequencing, building, classifying, persisting at tasks, turning knobs-children continue to build basic skills through manipulative play.  Children also learn to think logically, understand cause and effect, recognize shapes, and predict outcomes as they manipulate toys from this center.

But let’s not leave out the FUN!

The rain kept us inside all morning giving us the chance to open up our indoor slide and explore all our classroom centers.