Measurement concepts are often a part of children’s interactions. “My dad is bigger,” “I can jump higher,” and “I have more Playdough than you!” are common comparisons that children make. From the child’s perspective, these statements compare quantity; however, they provide a nice introduction to measurement.

Unfortunately, it is an often-neglected Content Standard in early childhood classrooms. Throughout the many projects we do throughout the week, we use both standard and nonstandard tools for measuring. Students are also provided with a multitude of measuring experiences throughout the year.

For this activity, your little one was presented with a problem. They were given five strips of paper of varying length. They were then asked to sort them by size. The target words for this activity were long, longer, and longest. Young children are natural problem solvers. To increase vocabulary and the comprehension of new concepts, students are asked questions that facilitate further exploration. The purpose of this is to promote measurement investigations and an interest in “figuring out” the answer.

Christmas is a theme that offers activities for your preschoolers to explore family traditions together!

It is such an exciting time of year and an exciting theme!

Your preschoolers have been learning about each other’s family traditions, which brings about so many opportunities for learning about giving to others!

Taking the time to explore the different aspects of this time of year can help give your preschoolers some perspective and understanding to it all!

For this activity, we decorated Christmas trees! Using artificial trees, garlands, and ornaments, we lavished our creations with color and fun.

Experiences like these grant children the independence to be creative and purposeful. When children choose how to play for themselves, they experience freedom in making those choices. They also begin to see connections between choice and the consequences or results of that choice.

Open-ended materials can be used in many ways so children can decide for themselves how to use them. It is this intrinsic motivation that allows a child to regulate her own feelings and desires in order to keep playing.

When children create an artificial environment, they bring three-dimensional reality to any concept.

Though your little ones are aware of what a Christmas tree is, they may not fully comprehend the trip it took for it to become one.

To help our budding arborists connect to this idea, we decided to create our very own pine forest!

This activity enabled students to not only learn about a foreign ecosystem, but additionally honed their academic skills and nurtured their innate curiosity and creativity.

The components of this project included white dough, artificial and organic pine boughs, styrofoam, and candy canes.

In addition to our regular Christmas activities, we also began to learn about the Legend of the Poinsettia, a Mexican legend depicting the adventures of Pepita and her brother Pablo.

Using colorful illustrations, your children were told a preschool-friendly version of the legend, and then were given red tinsel, plastic poinsettias, and baby food jars to make there very own poinsettia plants!

Young children are eager to learn about the world and they soak up the information like little sponges.

In our classroom, children discover their relationship to other humans through stories, cultural celebrations, and the enriched cultural curriculum and materials. Diversity activities teach young children to respect and celebrate the differences in all people. Learning about different cultural aspects offers new experiences for children. This activity aimed to do just that.

Long before the advent of Santa Claus and his elves, plants and trees that remained green all year had a special meaning for people in the winter.

Just as people today decorate their homes during the festive season with pine, spruce, and fir trees, ancient peoples hung evergreen boughs over their doors and windows.

In many countries it was believed that evergreens would keep away witches, ghosts, evil spirits, and illness. But it is Germany that is credited with starting the Christmas tree tradition as we now know it.

It all started in the 16th century, when the German people would bring decorated trees into their homes.

Some built Christmas pyramids of wood and decorated them with evergreens and candles if wood was scarce.

To recreate these early trees, we constructed our very own! Using blocks as our wood base and pine boughs, we formed our trees and then talked about them with our friends!

When learning about symmetry, young children benefit most when they are introduced to new vocabulary with hands on activities. Because they think in three dimensions, an impasse arises through verbal instruction, unless they are granted hands on experiences at the same time.

Young children will begin to understand the concepts and vocabulary of symmetry if you give them time to play symmetry games and experiment with symmetry art. For this activity, I placed a long piece of ribbon down the center of a piece of butcher paper, with a basket of candy canes to the side.

Because this was our first time exploring symmetry, we paused a moment to talk about what symmetry is and identified some examples of symmetry in our classroom. We started this activity by taking turns placing the candy canes on the “board”. For the first round, your little one placed a candy cane on her side of the “game board”, and Miss Carrie placed a matching candy cane on her side. As we moved forward in the game, each child began to see how we were creating a symmetrical design (and everyone noticed when I intentionally placed my candy cane in the wrong spot!).