We had a busy week! And, as usual, I took too many pictures… Dress-up is always a favorite, and I switched out some of the old stuff with a few new masks, accessories and outfits.
The weather is still a bit warm, but SO nice. The preschoolers always enjoy it out there.
We spent lots of time with Play-Doh just for fun. It's a very calming activity and seems to be one of their favorite things to do.
I got each preschooler a spider web lacing board to work on those ever-so-important fine motor skills. They each got to take one home with them.
We've been talking lots about the Book-It program at school and the kids often choose to look at books during free choice time, and then run to tell me that when they get home they will color their owl on the calendar! Let me know if you have any questions about the program.
Here are some more pictures of their play this week. They have such fun personalities, it's fun to see who is excited about what each day.
We talked a bit about Halloween and some of the creatures and characters that we will see during this month. After get excited about spiders and bats, I made that the theme for the week. We read Stellaluna, The Very Busy Spider, and several others. During table time, they did a spider match activity. This encourages number recognition, one-to-one correspondence, counting, visual discrimination, motor planning and coordination… When you're at home and there is an opportunity to count the number of objects, encourage your preschooler to do it. Make sure that they are counting as slowly as they are pointing, instead of rattling off 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 when there are only 5 objects.
We also made WEBS to catch a pesky fly, like in the book we had read.
During small groups I worked individually with the preschoolers on various skills using these sorting charts. They worked on color grouping, letter recognition and phonemic awareness (for charts that they had to try out the beginning sound of the word to figure out where it went). And of course as we picked up each chart, we did a little counting, patterning, etc. Just for fun. They are so smart!
Our Friday table time activity was to make BATS! They were beyond excited about this. We talked in circle time about what we would do, and that since this was ART, there was no wrong way to do it. I like the open creativity allowed in art, and for preschoolers who are learning so much about the right and wrong way of everything else right now, it's nice to have a freeing activity like this. Each bat turned out different, and each one was adorable. First, cutting out the wings and ears.
Then, getting lots of glue on the popsicle stick.
Putting on the goggly eyes.
Voila! Masterpiece finished!
We did a bit more with the fire safety activities too, since they had an interest in that from the previous week. We tried this visual discrimination and memory activity. The preschoolers look at the first picture for a few seconds, and talk about what they see. Then, I hide that picture and show one of the other 9 pictures (like the second drawing in the picture below) that is the same, but missing something. Can you spot it? They squeal with excitement when I say we are doing this game during circle time. Ha ha. They sure make my day fun!
