Small group time is a meaningful and important part of any preschooler’s day. It’s a time when teachers work with a small group of students and individualize instruction based on student needs.

For this group project, we explored the surface of the moon!

Using rocks and shredded paper “moon dust”, your little ones went on an adventure!

They used their hands to search for rocks, often teaming up with their friends to complete the task.

It was so exciting! Not only learning about what was on the surface of the moon, but the tactile feel of the paper “dust” sliding through our fingers!

Jasper is cute. I like his cheeks.

Manipulatives are an invaluable tool in any preschool classroom. They help students learn by allowing them to move from concrete experiences to abstract ones. Experts in education posit that this learning takes place in different stages.

For preschool children, the first stage involves symbolic thought. This refers to recognizing and labeling symbols that take on different meanings. Two examples of these are letters and numbers.

Seeing a letter, understanding that it is a symbol for something else (a sound), and then being able to create that letter is a difficult feat for any young learner. It is our goal to break up this reasoning into small steps that can be readily accessed by the young learner.

Manipulatives can also be important tools in helping students think and reason in more meaningful ways. By giving students concrete ways to compare and operate on such quantities, symbols, and other features can contribute to the development of well-grounded, interconnected understandings of different ideas.

For this activity, students used manipulatives to create the word STAR. They placed the manipulatives onto different points of the letters and then saw the final product!