Your little one participated in yet another fun sensory activity!

Using styrofoam as our base, white web material, sticks, and plastic bugs, your little one created their very own spider habitat!

We began this activity with a discussion and review of the spiders and other bugs that we have been learning about. We then talked about where these creatures lived.

Our discussion concluded with a review of the new vocabulary that we have been learning, such as insect, web, arachnid, antenna, web, and silk.  

Your little arachnid enthusiast then happily constructed the perfect living space for his spider friends.

Young children love to pour and dump, and derive much joy from engaging their senses to investigate their surroundings.

As they manipulate various substances, they are observing the physical properties of the world around them.

By transferring materials and exploring how they interact, they are learning about density, weight, and volume, which form the foundation for critical thought.

For this particular activity, we combined baking soda and vinegar to create witch’s potions.

Each child enjoyed watching their potions foam and come to life!

Preschoolers are constantly doing math, even when they are not aware of it. It enables them to problem solve, and make sense of the world around them. Because young children learn best by doing, opportunities that enable them to participate at a hands-on level yield the most promising results.

When they participate in their own learning experiences, they construct meaning as they communicate and represent their understanding of complicated concepts. To help improve our counting skills, we created “Frankensteins” out of flower foam.

Using golf tees as the mouth, nose, and eyes, we counted how many golf tees were needed to construct the “faces”, and then recorded our results.

As they assembled their creations, they were encouraged, not only to count, but to write down what they were counting. This enabled them to observe the relationship between the object in their hands and the symbol that represented what they were seeing.

When children work on puzzles, they are actually “putting the pieces together” in more ways than one. Puzzles help 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.

A puzzle with a picture that has particular interest for a child may help her begin to recognize colors and letters, and come to realize that the sum of parts make up a whole—a concept that will help her with math later on.

By inserting pieces into the puzzle, children also develop the muscle group used for writing, or the “pincer” grasp.

Children can work on puzzles by themselves, without the help of adults or other children.

They can also work together on large puzzles and practice compromising and getting along.

Because each child must concentrate on the puzzle individually, he experiences a sense of satisfaction as he picks up a piece, rotates it, and discovers the spot in which it fits.

Piece by piece, he begins to recognize the picture that the puzzle represents.

For this activity, your little ones took pieces of a spider web, and combined them to create their own spooky webs!

Young children are naturally curious and passionate about learning. In their pursuit of knowledge, they’re prone to poking, pulling, tasting, pounding, shaking, and experimenting.

From birth, children want to learn and they naturally seek out problems to solve.

Young children should learn science (and all other areas of study) through active involvement – that is, through first-hand, investigative experiences.

For this activity, we learned about the interaction between carbon dioxide and oxygen. Through our Expanding Ghost experiment, your little ones observed, predicted, and explored the physical properties of these two gases. We began by pouring a half cup of vinegar into an empty water bottle.

We than drew a face onto our deflated balloons.

Next, we placed the funnel into the open end of the deflated balloon and poured in baking soda.

After that, we secured the open end of the balloon onto the top of the bottle, careful not to dump the contents of the balloon into the bottle quite yet. Finally, we held the balloon upright, allowing the baking soda to fall into the bottle and mix with the vinegar. The result is an expanding ghost! How does it work? The product of the vinegar and baking soda is carbon dioxide, a gas present when we breathe out. The carbon dioxide inflates the balloon.

Science activities benefit your child in several ways. It involves asking questions, probing for answers, conducting investigations, and collecting data.

Science, rather than being viewed as the memorization of facts, becomes a way of thinking and trying to understand the world. This approach allows children to become engaged in the investigative nature of science and to experience the joy of having wonderful ideas.

Squishing, rolling, sculpting, molding . . . young children love to play with playdough. Add some props from around the home and playdough play becomes a powerful way to support your child’s learning.

This simple preschool staple lets children use their imaginations and strengthen the small muscles in their fingers—the same muscles they will one day use to hold a pencil and write.

Using playdough with you, a friend, or siblings supports your child’s social skills such as sharing, taking turns, and enjoying being with other people.

Playdough also encourages children’s language and literacy, science, and math skills—all at the same time! For this activity, we used orange playdough, plastic knives, rolling pins, ovens (made from boxes), and baking accessories to create Halloween treats!

Exploring feelings and emotions with children is powerful learning!

These investigations give us insight into how we interact with the world around us.

Often children do not have the vocabulary to explain how they feel.

By using plastic pieces on a jack-o-lantern as a means to create an array of facial expressions, children learn, discuss, and explore different feelings and emotions.

As a result, they learn how to give a voice to the many emotions they experience.

Collaborative learning is a teaching style that has evolved over the last thirty years and is still evolving.

There are three primary aims that encompass the collaborative process.

First, by working together, learners are empowered, as they collaborate with every other learner in the class in a playful, but purposeful way.

Second, collaborative projects communicate increasingly complex ideas by presenting them in concrete, visual and tactile ways.

They do this by removing abstract thinking out of heads and giving it a physical presence. Third, collaborative projects encourage exploratory talk in the classroom.

There is increasing evidence that new meanings are developed by the combination of thinking and communicating with others.

There is also evidence that talk has been neglected in our classrooms and this has widened the gap in attainment.

For this activity, we collaborated to construct a haunted house!

Using boxes and black paint, we all created the building blocks, and then, worked together to make our structure come alive!