Our PreSchool Blog

Welcome back!!  It was great to see everyone’s smiling face back in action today!  To start the new year off, we introduce new center activities, along with a new January country: Greenland.  With a cold climate and lots of white to see,  the children have lots of opportunity to explore activities with letters, numbers and shapes that represent snow and ice.  In Ms. Leslie’s small group, we played “Flurries or Snowstorm?”  The children chose a number, then put the corresponding “snowflakes” onto our winter scene.  In Ms. Lori’s small group, she showed the children several ways to build a snowman: rolling balls using playdoh, stacking different sized circles, and tracing a snowman.  In Ms. Courtney’s small group, the children used “snow” to trace out the letters V, W and X.  We had a snowtastic day!

We played a building game on Thursday to continue our math unit in comparing sets.  We rolled the dice, built our towers then compared our tower with our friends’ towers.  Who had more blocks in their tower?  Who had fewer?  Who had an equal amount of blocks in their towers?  Super easy game to do at home on a snowy day…all you need are some blocks and one die!

We created our own individual M&M graphs today to compare the quantities of different groups of colors in a bag of M&M’s.  They REALLY enjoyed this activity and I was VERY surprised at how many kids did NOT want to eat them at the end of, but rather take them home to repeat the activity at home.  TOO CUTE

We continued our math study in small groups through the creation of a Gingerbread Graph.  We took one big bite of a delicious gingergread cookie and recorded where we took our first bite on a class graph.  We then compared each column by identifying which location had the most names and the least names.  Looks like the leg was the winner!

We started a new math unit this week…Comparing Quantities of Sets.  We will be using a variety of graphs to explore what the words more, fewer, and equal mean.  We began our study at group time with a graph about which drink we wanted for snack.

The fun part about gingerbreads are decorating them!  Today, we traveled to our favorite nation, the imagination, and had a fun time pretending to decorate our gingerbreads.  Using number recognition, the children pulled a number, then put their one-to-one correspondence skills to work by putting the corresponding number of buttons on the gingerbread.  Working with the numbers four through nine really helped the children focus on their counting skills.

What better cookie to have to celebrate the holiday season than the traditional gingerbread cookie?  Today, the children helped to measure, pour and stir our ingredients.  We discussed wet and dry ingredients, smelled some of the ingredients (molasses anyone?!), and talked about getting the dough to just the right consistency to roll and stamp.  The children enjoyed all of the stirring involved and cracking the eggs, but I think kneading the dough, stamping out the gingerbread, and decorating topped their list!  Everyone brought home a festive, tasty treat!

Our weather has taken quite a chilly turn the past few days.  The children enjoyed every second of it on Wednesday during recess.  Because of the change in weather we talked about how weather changes quickly and what causes it on Wednesday during group time.  We used an interactive weather maker to create all sorts of wild weather by changing the humidity and temperature gauges.  To round out our patterning unit in math we recognized and extended weather patterns on our magnetic board.  Weather is wild and wonderful!

Our weather was the topic of our discussion during group time on Tuesday afternoon.  It was a rainy, rainy, rain day.  It seemed to last forever.  We read the book The Rainy Day by Anna Milbourne which told us about how clouds are formed and what happens inside the clouds to make the rain fall.

The children shared their favorite things to do on a rainy day…playing games was the top on the list!  We played all sorts of Rainy Day learning games in small groups including Dominos, Colorama, and Seasonal Science Sorting Game.  Sometimes rainy days can be the best days.