Our PreSchool Blog

We had a ball on Thursday during small groups.  Ms. Lori let us create an arctic scene from Greenland with homemade puffy paint and homemade textured sand paint.  The kids enjoyed adding the puffy fur onto the Polar Bear to help keep it warm.  During reading groups, after reading our readers, we played a Cookie Crunch Sight Word game on the Smartboard to polish our sight word recognition.  Then, we used our white crayons on black paper to practice our letter formation and orientation of our current sight words.  Watch out Kindergarten….here we come!

We read Snowballs today by Lois Ehlert then tried our hand at making our own snowball soap creations that won’t melt, but will slowly disappear after we use them to keep our hands clean!

We explored the concept of sinking and floating today in preschool.  We made our predictions and recorded them on a chart, then, tested our predictions first hand.  We then recorded our findings on a new graph to compare what we predicted against our findings.

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.

In preparation for a successful future in writing children must, regularly, be using the small muscles in their hands and fingers to strengthen them.  We used small blocks today during small groups along with shaving cream and wooden spatulas to help build these muscles.  Children are also acquiring knowledge and skills which will provide an important foundation for later learning.  From the wooden shapes, your child solves problems and gains confidence.  Building with blocks helps children learn what numbers stand for, and it encourages children to practice scientific, trial-and-error thinking as well as critical-thinking and decision making skills.  And of course…it was a lot of fun!

We explored math today in preschool during small groups.  We talked about different constellations (or parts of constellations) during group time and viewed them on the smartboard.   Then, we tried our hand at creating our own “Number Constellations.”  We used our fine motor skills (important for successful writing in the future) and poked holes in black paper to create different numbers.  Then we traveled over to the light table to view our creations.

The preschoolers explored all different types of harvest vegetables from the farm today.  Cutting them open we found that some have seeds while others do not.  Some are soft and easy to cut through while others are hard and tougher to cut.  Some have prickles on the outside leaves and some even have a large pit in the middle!  Vegetables of all kinds were the exploration of the day!  We had a ball!

We explored and discovered the science of leaves today during small groups.  First, we observed the details of our leaf an drew a sketch making sure to include all the details we saw.  Next, we found the “area” of our leaf by covering it with pennies.  Some leaves had an area of 8 pennies while others had an area of 15!  We had leaves of all sizes!  Lastly, we made our leaves float in a bowl of water and found how many pennies it took to sink them!  The children recorded their finding on their own science log.