Our PreSchool Blog

Young children learn in many different ways. One way they learn is through purposeful play and open ended activities. Open ended art experiences give them a chance to explore the world around them, ask questions, and see how things work. These art experiences allow them room to be themselves, make their own decisions, and just create. We used liquid watercolors, absorbent paper towels, eye droppers, and small paint brushes to create! The children loved watching their tiny drops spread and mix into a starburst as they hit the towels.

This week we began adding our Morning Table into our day!  Each day when the children come in, there is a fun activity for them to do on the table.  Sometimes it may be literacy related, shape related, or number related.  Other days it might just be some messy fun!  This week, one of our activities was working on the letter of the week, Letter A, and some fine motor practice as well!  Peeling off stickers is a great activity for your child to work on their fine motor skills at home too!

We have had a great first couple of days in the preschool room!  We have been learning how to use our clips when we want to play in a center, we’ve been making new friends, we read lots of stories, and we sang lots of songs!  We also got to do some fun sensory play while we learned about wearing team tags for our small groups!

We even practiced some of our letters!!

We fed Mr. Teni his favorite numbers during small groups!  This activity helped us build stronger hands while reviewing numbers 1-20.  This is a fun and easy activity to make and use at home…Mr. Teni loves to eat just about anything and is sure to help develop strong hands for strong and enthusiastic writers!

We continued our letter Ss study while building our hand strength in small groups!  Continuing to develop large and small muscle strength in the hands and forearms is extremely important during the preschool years.  When the large and small muscles of the forearm and hand are slow to develop, weakness and incoordination may result.  The large muscles of the forearm may overcompensate for weak inner hand muscles.  As a result, the child will find ways to hold, pinch and grip small objects in awkward ways.  By now your little ones should have transitioned from their fist grip on their writing utensils into a more developed grip.  Find the age appropriate pencil grip development chart here.  If you notice that your child shows signs of awkward grips, never hesitate to contact their teacher.  Click on the picture below for easy activities to build fine motor strength and hand strength at home.

We worked our fine motor muscles during our phonics study last week.  Our focus letter was the letter Ss!  After singing out letter s song during group time, we came up with words that started with the letter s as we used clips to pinch the poms and build our letter s.  There are many ways to build small motor muscles.  They are critical to becoming a great writer.  Keep working those fingers!