October Fun!

Finally! A new preschool post! As always, we've been busy little bees the past couple weeks. One big highlight was the pumpkin patch field trip. The weather was perfect and there was so much fun stuff to do. I'm working on putting together some pictures from the field trip and I'll try to share those with you all soon! It was also great to see so many of you at our big open house. I love seeing how proud the students are to show off all their work to their families and to show everyone around their room. It was definitely a fun evening!

We have continued talking all about fall and especially pumpkins! The kitchen center has now turned into our very own pumpkin patch. We took a closer look at the inside and outside of the pumpkins as well. It was fun to see them dig around in the inside of the pumpkins and to hear how they describe how it looks and feels in their own words. Another new exciting thing this past week was introducing the iPads to the students! We started learning how to use them and all the rules that go with it in a small group and then they were able to explore with them during center time. It's amazing how much they already know about them at such a young age! Our other small groups worked on counting and the letters in their name. For counting, the students had to count out real pumpkins seeds and match the amount of seeds to a pumpkin that had a number written on it. For their name practice we played the name erase game. On a marker board we helped them write out their name. Miss Lynne then held up letters of the alphabet one at a time, and if the students had that letter in their name they had to erase that letter off their board. It was fun to see who could keep letters on their board the longest.

We also had some exciting "Science Fridays"! Last week we went on a fall walk outside. The students were partnered up and each pair was given a clipboard with certain fall items to look for. It was great to see them work as a team and look for each thing along the way. The other fun science activity was predicting items that would sink or float in a tub of water. The students were pretty surprised that our apple and little pumpkin actually floated. Each student had a sink/float card and before each object they held up the card that they thought it would be. It's fun to let them think about each object and why or why not they think it might sink. It always amazes me how well they can predict and come up with valid reasons for their ideas.

Each class has now experienced their first fire drills! Both classes did such a great job and followed all directions really well. As you can imagine, it's a pretty loud noise but they all handled it just fine! The two classes have also learned the valuable lesson of how it is always a good idea to clean up at center time quickly. We learned that if we don't do our jobs right away, we might lose out on something fun later which is usually recess. I think they'll catch onto this idea fast because losing recess was a pretty big deal :)

This week we will continue some fun fall activities and practice our new skill that was introduced last week...rhyming! The students will also have the chance to practice making letters with our foam pieces (big lines, little lines, big curves, and little curves). I'm sure we will have lots of great things to share at the end of the week.

Preschool Update: Sept. 30- October 4

I can't believe that it's October already! Where has all the time gone? It was another great week in preschool! We finished up all of our activities with apples and prepared for our big field trip this next week to the pumpkin patch by starting some pumpkin activities. Our small groups this week focused on shapes, writing our names, and our letter B. We worked on our letter B page by painting with a balloon. I love seeing the surprised looks when I told them that they could paint with a blown up balloon. It's the small things that seem to excite the kids! Our second group was practicing writing our names. First they trace over their name and then practice writing it on their own. For right now we are practicing using the uppercase letters and will begin using lower case letters as time goes on. Our last group was making pictures with shapes. The students were given many different shapes on their tables and they got to create pictures out of them. We got some really creative creations and they will be on display for our open house this Thursday (5-7pm).

The students are so excited for the field trip to the pumpkin patch this week and so are we! We prepared for our trip by talking about how pumpkins grow during our "Science Friday". Hopefully you heard about that a little bit at home. We talked about the life cycle of a pumpkin and are looking forward to seeing the actual pumpkins and vines at the pumpkin patch. The students also made their own unique pumpkins that will be displayed out in the hallway for open house. We have some very cool creations to show off! This coming week we will continue all of this pumpkin fun as well as introduce our new letter F and the number 3.

As mentioned before, Madison's open house will be this Thursday, October 10 from 5-7 pm. This is a great time to come check out our room again and see all the things your child has been working on. I will also have a table set up to let you know of some things that you can donate to our classroom if you'd like. We have lots of fun ideas and activities in our room that require lots of supplies that aren't always provided by the school. You are welcome to bring grandmas and grandpas and any others that would like to see what a day at preschool is like. It will a busy classroom that night so it will be a time for your student to show you around the room and we'll save the playing for school days. We hope that we can see you there!

 

More Apples!

Last week we continued to study apples. The students have been enjoying learning about and even tasting the apples! We picked out a few of our yellow, red, and green apples and had a taste test. We then voted on which apple was our favorite and made a graph. The picture below will show you our results! For small groups we again did our three different activities. For the first group we did apple prints with paint on our letter A! We cut open apples in two different ways to get different prints. The kids thought it was pretty fun to dip the apples in the paint. Our second small group worked on finding all the letters in their name with letter beads. Once they found their letters they strung those beads on a string to make a name necklace. It was a great activity to work on names as well as fine motor skills. Our last group was measuring ourselves with apples. Each student laid down on the floor and had their friends line up apples to match their height. We then counted how many apples tall each person was. For our "Science Friday" activity, we took a look at our science experiment from last week when we cut up our apples and put them into different liquids. We definitely got some good results! The apples in water and salt water grew plenty of mold for us to see. The apples in vinegar and lemon juice grew no mold. We discussed how the vinegar and lemon juice have acid in them and it "protected" the apples from growing mold. It's so exciting to hear the thoughts and ideas the kids can come up with even at such a young age!

This week we are still doing some things with apples and also reviewing our shapes and colors. I'll give more details on this weeks activities in the next post. Don't forget to let me know if you'd like to join us on our field trip to the pumpkin patch next week. It's going to be a great time!

 Morning class on crazy hat day! 

Afternoon class on crazy hat day!

 The results of our apple taste testing. Red wins big!

 For snack we made our own apple trees with crackers, frosting, and M&M's. Yummy!

Checking out our science experiment one week later. It didn't look as yummy as last time. Eww, mold!

Here are our apples in the different liquids

Apples!

We have been having such a fun time talking about apples in preschool! Thank you so much for bringing all the apples in. It was fun to let the kids see all the different kinds of apples. For one of our large group times we set all our apples on the carpet and sorted them into groups. The kids did a great job coming up with different ways to sort them. We also had some fun apple activities for our small group times. We worked on our small muscles in our hands by tearing up pieces of paper and glueing them on a paper apple. The students also played an apple dice game to work on their counting as well as working on our first letter of the week (Aa) on our letter pages. Each week we will talk about a new letter and a new number. The two big highlights of the week were our "Science Friday" experiment and apple orchard dramatic play center. For our science experiment, we cut up pieces of apples and placed them in different liquids (water, salt water, vinegar, and lemon juice). We talked about what happens when an apple stays out too long after being cut. We then predicted if any of the liquids would help the apple from getting "yucky" and brown or if they might make them get brown even faster. We plan to leave them in the cups for a few days so make sure to ask them what happened to each piece of apple! As I mentioned before, we have our very own apple orchard in our room! The students have been enjoying picking apples and making apple pies in our dramatic play center. I can't wait to do more apple activities this week!

We have some very exciting things coming up in the next few weeks! School pictures will be on September 30th. We have it marked on our calendar at school and have already been talking about it with the students. We also have an exciting trip to the Pumpkin Patch planned for our first field trip. I'll be getting you some more information on this soon. And mark your calendars for our school open house on October 10th. It's been such a great start to our year so far. Time sure goes fast when you're having fun!!!

Picking apples in our apple orchard

  Fun in the blocks center

A bushel of apples!

The girls are making some apple pies

         

Experimenting with magnets at the science center

 The apple orchard was so popular that

  we needed to put out a sign up sheet to

  help us take turns

Our apple experiment on "Science Friday"!

We have finally started our first full week with both classes! I can't believe it took this long. Our afternoon class is doing a great job of catching up to the morning class. This week we started talking about apples and our first letter Aa! It was fun to hear each class come up with words that start with the letter Aa. Thank you to those that brought in an apple for us to examine today. We are going to be doing all sorts of activities with them. Today we put them all out to look at and thought of different ways we could put them in groups (size, color, stem/no stem, sticker/no sticker). They loved looking at all the different kinds and are anxiously awaiting the day we get to eat them! Make sure you keep checking in with your child this week and next to find out all the cool things we are doing with apples!

It was great receiving a few of the family projects already! It's so fun to see how excited the kids are to show them off. We will be sending home a few other exciting things soon. We have our first book order ready to go this week. I will be sending home a note with some more information about that. We also have our first field trip planned for October! The pumpkin patch! We will be getting more information to you soon. The dates are listed to the right in important dates. I'll be sure to keep the updates on here coming. So much fun stuff to share!

 Team work! They all worked together to complete this big puzzle.

 Enjoying some books in our reading library.

 Exploring the sensory table that's filled with beans. We try to keep more beans

 in the table than on the floor. Easier said than done :)

One of their favorite things to do is play teacher!

Welcome!!

Our year is off to a crazy start so far! With this crazy heat, those poor afternoon kids are still waiting for their first day of preschool. Hopefully everything will be back to normal next week, and we can start our  regular routine with both classes! We are going to have a lot of fun in preschool this year, and it's important to me that you all get to see the exciting things we will do each week. I thought it would be a great idea to start this blog and share with you so that you can get a peek into the classroom and what we have been busy doing each week. I'll also post reminders and important dates so it will be a great resource for you to have. Let me know if you have any questions about the blog or suggestions on what you'd like to see on here! Hopefully it will be a great tool for everyone!

Miss Stacey