Our PreSchool Blog

We had a great time celebrating Autumn in the toddler room!

Our Discovery bins were filled with beans, leaves, mini pumpkins and scoops and bowls to practice pouring and scooping.  These bins also foster discussion of colors, letters, and shapes.

We used fall colored fingerprints to make turkey feathers for a Thanksgiving craft!

Our watercolored leaves turned into fall foxes!

We practiced fine motor skills by coloring, stickers, and fall themed playdough cookie cutters.

Fall provides some yummy apples.  We used the special peeler to get our snack prepared!

Fall was fun! Winter is coming…

For the month of November, we will be focusing on the use of our five senses: touch, taste, sight, smell, and sound. Early education focuses a lot of learning through sensory play and active learning because our senses are some of our most useful learning tools! It is important for toddlers to continue to develop their different senses, as well as to learn the use of their senses, because that is their means of processing the world around them. Use of the five senses can help children link their senses to recalling memories, which helps with overall cognitive development.

With our toddlers, we made pumpkin muffins as a class, and we used our senses to explore what we were making along the way. Here goes some multi-sensory learning!

Ms. Kristen had some already made muffins in the Mystery Can, and our friends listened to the sound it made in the can. We then started making our muffins, by adding each ingredient in a big plastic bag, one step at a time. Our friends got to smell each ingredient we were adding (yum, cinnamon!) throughout the process.

After adding all of our ingredients, it was time to mix the batter together. Each of our friends got to take a turn (yay, sharing!) mixing our muffin batter in the bag. They loved how squishy and soft it felt!

After putting the batter into the pan, our friends got to add their own chocolate chips on top–we always love to sneak in some fine motor skills 😉

They used their sense of taste at snack time, when they got to enjoy what they helped make!

In our discovery tubs the toddlers found farm animals, corn, straw, birdseed and tongs.

When kids use tongs, they have to learn to “separate” the two sides of their hands (thumb/index finger side and middle/ring/pinky finger side), which is a great for developing hand skills, necessary for cutting with scissors and writing with pencils.  Tong play can begin as early as toddlerhood and can progress to more refined use of kiddie chopsticks and tiny tweezers as kids progress through elementary school. It’s never too late to have fun with tongs! *

For more great activities to do with Tongs check out http://mamaot.com/2012/10/16/ways-to-play-with-tongs/.

*information provided by  50 Fun Ways to Play with Tongs