Our PreSchool Blog

Happy Valentine’s Day!  These little heart breakers had a love-filled morning with our Valentine activities.  Using our color recognition and sorting skills, the boys and girls sorted their very own box of candy hearts on their candy heart graphs.  Ask your little valentine how all of the hearts were sorted.  The children then had the opportunity to pass out their Valentine’s to each child.  The boys and girls really enjoyed celebrating friendships!

As we usher in a new month, the children have the opportunity to discover new things in our centers.  All of our centers have new items, but today we focused on the math, literacy and art centers.  Learning how to do new activities is just one more way to practice/learn a skill in a different way.

With our mitten activity today, the children were eager to not only sort and graph our mittens, but talk about giving the mittens to boys and girls who need them.  With so many mittens, the children did an excellent job of sorting them by color and graphing each one by categories: Does it have a design on it?  Stripes?  Is it a solid color?  After sorting the mittens, we then decided which category had the most, and which has the least.  We then took the category that had the most (the design category) and counted how many there were.  We are so proud of how excited and eager the children were to donate to the children of First Step Home.  A big thank you to all of you who brought in your generous mitten donations and for helping us teach your children such a valuable lesson!

During small groups today, our focus was the math concept of sorting.  We sorted ice by their shape…it was COLD!

Cooking doesn’t have to involve complex baking.  Today the children took over as each child had their own plastic knife and bowl to chop up lots of fruit and stir in a little Cool Whip to create a delicious Ambrosia Salad.  Those fine motor skills are coming along as some of the children were able to master the grip and back and fourth motion of the knife!  The children enjoyed choosing his/her own fruit and creating their own kitchen masterpiece!

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

Sorting was everywhere today in the PreK classroom.  We got our life size grid out at group time and sorted our shoes and even sorted ourselves!  The children decided that they could sort their shoes by color, type, size, and laces/no laces.  We also sorted ourselves by hair color…sorting is fun!

Laces/No Laces

Hair Color

We fine tuned our sorting skills today by identifying and sorting our buttons by their various attributes.  The children decided to sort them by color, size, shape, number of holes, and number of sides.  Sorting is a great activity to do at home.  You can sort most anything!

There is never a dull moment when our friends from the Cincinnati Museum Center join us for the day!  In keeping with our farm theme, Ms. Deann brought a lot of (pretend) furry friends that live in the barnyard or the backyard.  The entire presentation is interactive as each child gets his/her own barnyard or backyard animal to hold on to.  One-by-one, the adult version of the animal is pulled out and matched with its baby.  Each child was able to come up, learn the proper names of the animal and its baby, and discuss if it is found in the backyard, barnyard or pond.

At the end, Ms. Deann brought a very special furry friend – a live bat named Griffin!  The children learned the term “echolocation” and what that means.  Before they got to see Griffin, they were able to use a finger puppet bat and bug to actually play out how echolocation works.  Just another day on the farm!