October Newsletter

   We had so much fun learning about different modes of transportation during October!  We started out learning about vehicles with wheels.  We read Alphabeep by Debora Pearson, and the children liked looking at the colourful pictures and reading about all the different types of vehicles there are. They also had a lot of fun exploring paint mixing, while incorporating marbles into their play.  Some children just chose to dab the marbles onto their papers, others chose to pick up their cookie sheets and help roll the marbles across the paper.  Some even decided it was more fun to finger paint!  We talked about the rules of the road, and created stop lights by ripping red, yellow and green paper and gluing them to our stop light.  The kidlets enjoyed ripping up the paper, but had some difficulty trying to glue it down.  We even played "Red Light, Green Light" which was a big hit!

 

   Next we spent a day talking about Thanksgiving, and doing Thanksgiving activities.  The Tuesday kiddos got to make pumpkin cookies!  They had tons of fun mixing up the ingredients, and were very patient waiting their turn to add ingredients.  And of course, they enjoyed eating the cookies for snack and taking some home to share!

   Both groups enjoyed making their turkey craft, and especially enjoyed playing with the turkey's after the glue had dried.  We definitely had a lot of turkey chasing going on that day!  We even had a turkey come and visit us at preschool!  He was a little cold because he lost his feathers, but the kids enjoyed adding feathers to him to help warm him up. We used megablocks to stamp corn kernals onto some blank corn shapes, even little Emily had a ton of fun using the mega blocks in a very different way!

 

 

 

   Next we talked about trains! An alphabet train made a surprise stop at preschool, and the children had fun trying to match up the letter boxes to the correct train car.  If you'd like a copy of the Alphabet Train to add in your own home, click here. The children put together their own train puzzle, and tried to match up numbered trains.  It was a little tricky to figure out which trains matched, but eventually they got it.  Jack discovered the "Barrel of Monkeys" during Free Time, and had a lot of fun counting the monkeys he was able to hook up, and tried to create some patterns.

 

 

   Boats, boats, and more boats! This was such a busy day, that I hardly got any pictures! We talked about different jobs that happen on boats like raising the anchor, and starting the motor. The children had a lot of fun acting out all the different things it requires to make a boat go. We looked at pictures of different kinds of boats, and talked about how they were used. Of course the favorite boat was the pirate ship, and they incorporated some pirate play into their Free Time.  Each child got to create a boat out of a paper plate, complete with a mast and sail. I had filled up our sensory bin with water the night before, and kept it hidden until we were ready to see if our boats would float.  They did!  The kidlets had so much fun blowing their ships across the bin.  We then pretended that some tupperware containers were boats, and guessed whether they would float or sink.  We grabbed some marbles and took turns adding marbles to the containers to make them sink.  They had such excitement as the containers slowly got closer and closer to sinking, and shrieked when they finally did!  Next, we looked around the room for different objects to test out whether or not they would sink.  It turned into quite a crazy time, and poor Andrew was soaked by the end of the day!  Even after I had taken the bucket away, they were "painting" the tables with the spilled water.

 

 

   Next we talked about airplanes.  We looked through Richard Scarry's "A Day at the Airport" and discussed all the things that happen inside an airport.  We made decorated foam airplanes, and flew them around the room.  They were trick planes, and did lots of flips before crashing to the ground.  I created some paper airplanes that flew a lot better than our foam planes, and they enjoyed throwing them back and forth at each other.  We created a line on the carpet, and played "In the Airport, Out of the Airport".  One side of the line was in the airport, and the other was out of the airport.  The children had to jump over the line according to what was called.  They had a lot of giggles, as they kept getting mixed up about what side of the line to go to!


   To wrap up our Transportation Theme, we talked about Emergency Vehicles.  In writing time we practiced writing the different names of all the vehicles. We looked at all the different kinds of emergency vehicles, and how they help us. We made a firetruck out of different shapes, and even watched a short clip about a firetruck going to help put out a fire!  We talked about what to do in an emergency, and had a pretend fire drill to practice.  We made a booklet of all the different types of vehicles we may see in our neighbourhood, and the coloured the pages.

Halloween Party!

  On the 28th and 29th each group had a Halloween Party!  We read "Where's my Mummy?" during Circle Time.  The Tuesday kidlets thought it was pretty funny that the mummy had met all these scary creatures while looking for his mummy, but was scared of mouse!  We learned a new song called "Five Little Pumpkins", and both groups had fun acting out the actions with the song.  We then found some other Halloween songs on Youtube, and spent some time dancing to get rid of all our excess energy that we had.

On Tuesday, we two princesses, a monkey, and Scooby Doo!

We had a lot of Spider-Man's come on Wednesday! The Hulk even came, but didn't want to be in the picture.

       For our craft, the children were able to choose a coloured piece of construction paper and stick foam Halloween stickers on it.  It always amazes me at how different their pictures are!  Some stacked their stickers, some placed them wherever there was room, and one little guy made quite the picture with his stickers!

   After our craft, we got to play with pumpkin guts!  The kids had so much fun squishing the pumpkin inside the bags.  That was, until they squished it so hard, and accidentally popped the bag!  They had quite the surprise on their face to discover pumpkin guts on their hands!

   Next we made a ghost!  We took poured some vinegar into a bottle, then added some baking soda into a white balloon.  Then we put the balloon on the bottle, and dumped the baking soda inside!  The kids had such a hoot!  Both groups wanted to do it 3 times!  On the third time, we wanted to try and blow up the ghost so big that he would pop.  But, instead of popping him we ended up filling him with the baking soda and vinegar foam.  Which was okay, because that meant he was able to hang out around preschool for the remainder of the day.

   The best part of our Halloween Party was the mystery bags!  I had filled brown paper bags with monster teeth (popcorn seeds), witches fingers (carrot sticks), eyeballs (peeled grapes), and brains (cooked speghetti that I even dyed pink for added effect).  The children weren't allowed to look in the bags, they were just told of the gross thing hidden inside and encouraged to reach in and touch it.  The Tuesday group had such fun!  They touched everything, even the brains!  The Wednesday group, not so much.  They touched the monster teeth, witches fingers, and eyeballs.  Jack was the first to touch the eyeballs, and his reaction was full of excitement, grossness, and curiousity!  I wish I had been able to catch it on camera! I don't think he was expecting to touch something slimy inside the bag!  No one wanted to touch the brains though!  Even after I had shown them what the brains really were, they didn't want to touch them!

September

Wow! Our first month of preschool for the 2014/2015 school year has quickly come and gone! During this month the kiddos and I had so much fun learning about our new friends, manners, emotions, and so much more!  We've worked on social skills, fine motor skills, and writing/literacy skills, along with learning about our daily theme.  And of course, we had some time to just have fun!

   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.