This month, we are learning all about arctic animals.

Using wooden play dough hammers, we practiced freeing our arctic friends from large chunks of ice.

This encouraged motor development, hand-eye coordination, creativity, and math and science skills!

As young children explore with age-appropriate tools, they use small and large muscles.

As they make decisions about the orientation of the hammer, they participate in problem solving skills.

Lastly, as they complete their project, they experience a feeling of accomplishment. Most importantly, they had fun while doing it!

Your preschooler consistently expresses her preference for tactile play. As young children seek to grasp new information, this form of play provides the perfect forum to apply newly acquired concepts.

As they interact with peers, their teacher, and provided materials, your budding ornithologist forms relationships to learned notions that enable them to make sense of their world. For this particular activity, we learned about how snow owls are born. Because they are reptiles, most birds lay eggs.

Using play dough, tiny snow owls, sticks, and rocks, we created our very own owl nests! We first made the play dough (using salt, flour and water), and then created our nests!

Your little scientist enjoyed spinning elaborate tales of baby owl cavorting through the “snow forest” as they followed their “parents”. Their conversations allowed for the processing of new vocabulary and the enjoyment of working together toward an idealized goal.

Although the formal study of reading and writing does not occur until kindergarten, young children are capable of recognizing letters and their functions.

Providing regular opportunities to practice pre-reading skills, is essential in gaining knowledge of the alphabet and its association to how words work.

Using flour and our fingers, we practiced tracing the letter W.

Throughout the week, we have been talking about different words that start with the letter W.

We have additionally been singing songs that reinforce the different sounds that W makes.

Using socks as flippers and white paint, we created our very own walruses! We began the project with a discussion about what walruses, where they live, what they eat, and what flippers are!

We then dove into the paint, and created a messy, but fun masterpiece! This sensory activity was one of the favorites for the week!

Sensory play is important because it gives children the change to play with different types of textures, which helps them to build new ways of talking about the world.

Sensory play is also calming for young children. It helps regulate their internal discomfort by soothing their senses and providing a creative outlet for their emotions.

Since we are learning about snow owls this week, we used to play dough to create our own!

Using play dough as a medium, feathers, and plastic eyes, we created our own version of our favorite snow owls!

Using play dough helps a child practice using certain physical skills with the hands when they manipulate the dough with their fingers.

Children can practice skills such as pinching, squeezing or poking while they play with the dough.

Lastly, using play dough helps a child practice using imagination and other cognitive abilities such imitation, symbolism and problem solving.

This helps your little ones learn more about their environment as they make and mimic everyday objects with the play dough.

Using pre-cut pictures, we practiced putting snow owls 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.

Using crackers and penguin diagrams of varying numbers and amounts, we learned and revisited counting and Arabic numerals!

Each child was given a group of goldfish crackers, and a picture of penguins with numbers inside them.

Once again, we are using things that our little ones are naturally interested in to teach about counting, numeral recognition, and patterns!

Not limited to just numbers, preschool math incorporates a broad range of skill sets and knowledge including sorting, colors and recognizing groups and patterns.

These activities teach our little ones about problem solving and using logic. This activity also involved fine motor skills, as they manipulated Their fish and attached them to their rows.

Sorting is a beginning math skill. It may seem that a big chunk early math is about learning numbers and quantity, but there’s much more to it. By sorting, children understand that things are alike and different as well as that they can belong and be organized into certain groups. Getting practice with sorting at an early age is important for numerical concepts and grouping numbers and sets when they’re older.

This type of thinking starts them on the path of applying logical thinking to objects, mathematical concepts and every day life in general. Studies have even been shown that kids who are used to comparing and contrasting do better in mathematics later on. For this activity, we practiced sorting different colored moose. Using our thinking minds, we placed different colored moose onto the different colored circles of a Twister board! Since we are learning about moose, this was a perfect complement to our curriculum!

Food preparation is not only a fun, engaging activity for children,  but one that can be used for years as an important teaching and development tool for all ages. For one thing, hands-on cooking activities encourage a sense of pride and confidence. The act of following a recipe can encourage self-direction and independence, while also teaching children to follow directions and use thinking skills to problem solve.

Working with food also inspires children’s curiosity, thinking, and problem solving, offering new opportunities to make predictions and observations.

Additionally, creating snacks offers authentic opportunities for students to understand and apply their knowledge of measuring, one-to-one correspondence, numbers, and counting. As they follow a recipe, children organize ingredients, follow a sequence, and carry out multiple directions.

Lastly, chopping, squeezing, mixing, and spreading materials help develop a child’s small muscle control and hand-eye coordination. For this activity, we used a few ingredients to crease Moose Snacks. We used graham crackers as the head, pretzels as the antlers, and blueberries as the eyes. Once we were finished, we ate up our yummy creations!