We started off our year learning about ourselves and our friends. Each child shared a little bit about themselves each day. We learned what our friends liked to do, what they liked to eat, and their favourite colours along with many other things about them. We used our blocks in the block centre to build a tower to measure how tall we are, then compare our heights with our friends. We made "friendships" for each friend, and listed some of the nice things we noticed about our friend. We read "Rainbow Fish" and discussed what it means to be a good friend. The children enjoyed making their own rainbow fish out of coffee filters, markers, and eye droppers. They thought it was fascinating to see the colours run together once the water was added.
We even got to learn about their families! Each child was asked to bring in a picture of their family to put on our wall. Before their picture was put up, everyone had a chance to talk about who was in their family, and share some of the fun things they liked to do as family. The kidlets had fun making a popsicle puppet for each of their family members. Some friends brought in pictures of their pets, and enjoyed telling everyone all about their pet.
We moved on to learn about our bodies, first focusing on what makes us different. We learned that we all are similar (we all have 2 eyes, 2 ears, hair, etc) but those things can be different. Some of us have blonde hair, and some of us have brown eyes. The children had fun looking in mirrors to figure out what physical features they have, and how they're features are different from another's features. We made collages out of tissue paper, and then compared how everyone's collage was unique just like them!
We then talked about what we can do with our bodies, how to take care of them, and that our bodies are made up of bones. A skeleton came to visit us at preschool for a few days, and the children thought he looked pretty weird to have no skin. We used him as a puzzle, and worked together to try and fit all of our bones back together. We made a copy of our hands and gave ourselves some bones using q-tips and glue. Apparently some children have a crazy amount of bones! And others don't think they have too many bones. We talked about what we should cover our bodies with to keep them safe, and the children enjoyed matching clothing to the appropriate body part it protects. We also talked about what we should eat. We made a chart titled "Healthy Food" and "Junk Food", and each child got a turn flipping a card then placing it in the appropriate category. We had some good laughs as some children tried to get away with saying candy was "Healthy Food".
We also talked about our 5 senses. Some of the children LOVED finger painting, others were a bit unsure and preferred to use the paintbrush. All of the children loved playing our guessing game! I had all the children sit at the table, and showed them 5 brown paper bags. Inside each bag was something different, and I went around to each child and they stuck their hand in the bag to feel what was inside to try and guess what it was. They had so much fun trying to use their sense of touch to figure out what was in the bags! And what a surprise it was when the object was revealed after everyone had a turn!
We then moved onto talk about our emotions. We used easter eggs with faces to talk about what kind of emotions we have. The children had fun mixing up the eggs, and creating some very interesting emotions! We talked about what was a good way to show our emotions, and what was a bad way. The children thought it was really fun when we played a game to showcase our emotions. I would say an emotion (ie:scared) and they would have lots of giggles trying to act out the emotions. For our craft, we used dry pasta noodles to make faces. Most of our faces didn't really look like faces, but the kidlets had a fun time making up their goofy faces.
