Writing can be especially frustrating for young learners, and so we use a variety of methods to keep our spirits high! One of these is the salt tray! Adding a salt tray or salt box to the preschool classroom is a wonderful way to promote writing skills.
In our second week of ants, we talked about the letter A. To encourage your little one to practice their writing skills, we wrote letter As in salt tray!
Using small paint brushes, your little one “painted” a letter A with their salt.
They then added ant toys that they placed “inside” their letters.
Lastly, they enjoyed pushing their ants around, creating salt ant hills for their creatures to live in.
What is soft and colorful and can squish through your fingers? The answer is play dough. The invention of play dough dates back to the 1930s. Originally it was invented to be wallpaper cleaner.
However, after a classroom of children began using it as a modeling compound, it was reformulated and introduced to the Cincinnati schools in the mid-1950s as play dough. Today play dough can be found in almost every preschool and kindergarten classroom. Bringing play dough into a learning center offers a variety of educational opportunities.
It is a great, inexpensive educational tool that can be used to foster creativity, literacy, and math skills. And most importantly of all, kids love play dough. There is something magical about rolling, patting, and squishing the brightly colored dough with your fingers. For this activity, we used play dough to create our very own ants!
To begin with, we talked about what an insect is. Students learned that one thing that makes insects different from other bugs, is the number of legs they have. They were told that ants, like other insects, have six legs. Your little one also learned about what an antenna is. Within the ant colony, these antenna are used to communicate. Following a brief discussion, students created their own ants with play dough, black pipe cleaners, and googly eyes!
Ants create nests in many places, but in North America their nests are mostly constructed underground or in fallen logs.
Ants are constantly excavating their underground homes and carrying the soil up to the surface.
They can create large mounds of soil and sand outside their nest entrances.
Some ants build up their mounds with sticks and pine needles and bits of grass.
This visible part is called an “ant hill” or an “ant mound.” Often a single nest will have more than one opening. For this activity, we created our own ant hills out of kinetic sand!
Many preschoolers are able to use numbers arbitrarily; pretending to count, or mixing up numbers and letters.
From about the age of four, preschoolers will begin to show one to one correspondence, or the ability to count objects correctly, as well as recognize most numbers 0-9 and sometimes recreate numerals when given an example.
As with many preschool skills, it is important for young students to be given many different opportunities for to see, touch and use numbers throughout the day.
Including numbers in thematic play is one way that they can begin to recognize numbers.
For this activity, your little one participated in a sorting/numeral recognition activity that tied in with our ant theme.
Using manipulatives and pictures of grass (with numbers printed on them), your little one practiced sorting and matching groups of ants with their corresponding numeral.
Since we were working on numbers 10-20 this week, we used these numbers in this activity.
Clown fish belong to the subfamily Amphiprioninae in the Pomacentridae family. These species are considered to be symbiotic mutualisms with sea anemones in the wild. Although the physical coloring predominantly depends upon the type of species, most clown fish exhibit orange, blackish, yellow, and reddish color interspersed with white blotches.
Clown fish are sometimes referred to as a strong territorial species and often come into conflict with each other. These species communicate by producing ticking noises with the help of pharyngeal teeth that are aligned with the throat. The male clown fish is known to create sound pulses on particular occasions. The female, however, is the more aggressive of the two. There are 335 clown fish species around the world.
For this activity, we used play dough, pipe cleaners, and toy clown fish to recreate the interdependent relationship between the clown fish and the sea anemone! This helped your little one practice their fine motor skills, work on their hand-eye coordination and encourage spatial reasoning, as they “placed” their fish into their anemone homes!
Young children enjoy learning about how things work.
By participating in a vast array of science activities, they are learning important critical thinking and observation skills.
These activities also promote their inherent sense of curiosity about the world.
For this activity we experimented with sinking and floating.
Using real items (in our case crustaceans and sea shells), we placed them in fresh water and then salt water (to incorporate into our Under the Sea theme) and observed whether they would sink or float.
For this traditional activity, we practiced walking like crabs! To begin with, we read the book House for Hermit Crab, by Eric Carle. Following this, we had a very interesting discussion about hermit crab homes. For instance, students learned that these crabs find shells that they use as their “houses”.
Because of this, it makes walking difficult. To understand the plight of the crab in the story, we talked about what the word “awkward” means and how it applies to the character in the story.
Following this, we practiced doing our own version of the crab walk! To begin with, students were instructed to sit with their hands on the floor with their knees bent. Following this, they were directed to push their bodies toward the ceiling. Finally, everyone giggled as they attempted to race their friends around the room!
Different creatures survive in different types of habitats. On this day your little one learned that habitats are environments that a particular plant or animal is perfectly suited for. To learn some more about creatures living under the sea, we used this particular Tuesday afternoon to talk about the whale! Whales are fascinating creatures, particularly because they are so mysterious.
Though they are among are the world’s largest creatures, they are gentle giants (with the exception of a few), feeding on thousands of plankton throughout the course of their day. These amazing animals make their homes in the warm and cold waters of the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. To help us identify with these “homes”, we created our very own under water habitats using a few materials. Habitats are among our favorite kinds of activities in Miss Carrie’s class. There are several ways to introduce the concept of an under water habitat to young children. The most effective way is for them to create a small habitat model using natural materials.
As they do this, they may create stories and scenarios that apply to recently acquired knowledge (in this case, the whale).Their imaginative brains are constantly conceiving plots and characters for even the simplest of things. This tendency for creative story building can be incorporated into any curriculum. To integrate this into our week of the whale, we discussed the characteristics of this particular habitat, why our whale sharks may prefer this as their home, and then created our own narratives to go along with it!
Young children learn measurement initially by sorting objects by size. For this particular activity, we practiced sorting and measuring the length of toy sharks. Measurement can be a tricky concept for preschoolers to grasp, so experimenting with real objects assists them in the understanding of complex measurement concepts.
When relaying concepts of measurement, it’s best for your budding scientists to stay concrete because that’s how preschoolers think at this stage of their development. A preschooler would have a tough time learning the ropes of measuring skills using a regular ruler.
They don’t have much of a handle on any abstract skills yet, and measurement falls in that abstract area. Still, the basics of measurement can be taught at the preschool level with great effectiveness by using very basic measuring methods.
The sorting activity helps develop a sense of the awareness that every day objects have a certain length. This length can be determined by “measuring” the object in comparison to other objects. Even though “inches” or “centimeters” are much too abstract for a preschooler’s grasp, the concept of comparing lengths of items is more concrete and can be a great way to introduce measurement.
The acquisition of measurement concepts also includes new vocabulary. Throughout the activity, your little one was encouraged to use words such as longer, smaller, heavier, lighter, and variations of the terms such as large, larger, and largest.
Using pre-cut pictures, we practiced putting gray whales together!
Puzzles help young children build the skills they need to read, write, solve problems, and coordinate their thoughts and actions – all of which they will use in school and beyond.
They also help them begin to recognize colors and shapes, and come to realize that the sum of parts make up a whole – a concept that will help them with math later on.
By arranging pieces into the puzzle, your little one also develops the muscle group used for writing, or the “pincer” grasp.
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