Doing puzzles together is a great activity for team building and friendship. They have to work together or the puzzle will never be finished. We did lots of puzzles this week.
Super heroes and bad guys continues to be a favorite toy when I bring them out for free choice play. They are so creative and elaborate with their story lines, I love listening to them deciding who will be good or bad and what their jobs are and what things they need to do and say… Hawken usually takes on the role of script writer and tells everyone what to say. This won't always work in play, but these guys are all okay with it.
Fine motor activities are always dual purposed and they love to play while building their fine motor skill set. Lacing works perfectly for this. Logan whips through these activities and is always ready for more.
Another fine motor and visual scanning and sorting activity is this "Scramble" game. After the timer beat Ryan three times, he finally got them all in with 10 seconds to go! Woohoo!
The kids built train tracks everyday this week. Some covered the entire floor. It gave me some inspiration for a quick activity, and the kids drew their own tracks to help the train do all it's jobs before going in the shed at the end of the day. Then they drew their favorite train on the back, including writing the train's name.
We tried out some new (and a few old) patterning, sequencing, counting, and identifying numerals games - all math centered. These are some REALLY smart kids.
I bought some watercolor paper, which is supposed to make water color paintings more vibrant. We tried it out, and the kids LOVED their artwork. We made rainbows and they turned out so well.
Jeff is explaining that there are usually clouds when it rains and there are rainbows, so painting a rainbow without a cloud would be silly. Silly me, I forgot to tell the others about clouds before they painted… :) Notice his two little clouds at the bottom edges of his rainbow.
Another highlight of the week was that Jeff turned 5! We celebrated at school by singing to him (lots of times), and asking him questions about his upcoming party during circle time. He loved all the special attention. Here he is picking out his birthday prizes.
Using some of the larger sized watercolor paper, I had each preschooler write their letters. Later on next week we will finish this activity and paint it too.
We celebrated Lunar New Year! We made paper lanterns and danced the dragon dance. While we waited for parents to pick-up, we watched a quick YouTube video of Disney's version of the dragon dance and tried it out ourselves. I should have filmed it, because it was adorable. One kid in front as the face and front legs, and one kid in the back as the body, back legs, and tail.
