To help us hone our fine motor skills, we strung pipe cleaners through an ant-themed lacing card. Parents may think that activities like these have very little developmental significance, but the truth is just the opposite.

Activities like these are crucial because they allow a break in the sometimes monotonous tasks of tracing or even coloring, and provides a wide range of motion that young writers can use.

Lacing activities also enable young children to become aware of the roles of their dominant and non-dominant hands. Stabilizing the cards while working the pipe cleaner through the holes strengthens those little fingers and muscles.

Storyboarding, or picture writing, is the origin of all written languages, used by ancient cultures before text evolved and as a natural bridge to text. The Chinese language was built using pictographs.

Egyptians used storyboards, or hieroglyphics, first etched in stone and later written on papyrus, to organize a complex society and to rule the ancient world. In our classroom, we use a variation of the story board.

We call it the story tray! Story trays are one of several tools introduced during circle time that work for younger students for whom the visual and the concrete are helpful elements in absorbing abstract ideas.

For this activity specifically, we recreated the story of The Ants are Marching, by Dan Crisp. To begin with, students surrounded the story tray to reenact the story. They were then each given a character in the story.

As the story progressed, students placed their “character” onto the tray. We did this until the story was completed.

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.