Fine motor activities are the most difficult for young children to practice on a consistent basis. Because they are mobile and constantly on the move, they tend to prefer gross motor activities such as jumping, running, pulling, and pushing.

To continue to hone these necessary skills, your little one participated in a special activity designed to build and refine the small muscles in their hands. Experiences such as these aid your little one’s ability to grasp a writing instrument, manipulate tiny objects, and handle scissors.

For this activity, your little one was directed to grab the letters of their name with a clothespin. Their task was to maintain a firm grip on the clothespin as they placed it into a matching letter.

All letters were vertical, so they worked from top to bottom, enjoying themselves in the process!

During our week of name-based activities, we used a variety of mediums to compose our names.  To help your little one identify the letters in their names in a new way, a sensory component was added to our curriculum for the week.

Using rice, magnetic letters, and paper letters, your little one spelled their name, yet again! With their thinking minds, they dug around in a bowl of rice, searching for magnetic letters, and matching them to paper ones. After finishing this task, they were asked to both name and enunciate the letters in their names, laughing as they did so!

The tactile experience (touching a letter with your finger) is important for building a memory trace. This enables students to acquaint the name of each letter with a visual representation for the letter sound.

For a child who is struggling with their letters, the sooner they can integrate the sound of the letter with what it looks like, the sooner their writing contains more meaning for them. For this activity, we talked about the letters in our names.

We discussed words that begin with the first letter;  and then broke up additional letters into their component parts. Using our fingers, we moved to our writing trays, where we traced (with some help from Miss Carrie) the letters in our name, using rainbow paint and glitter.

Circle time is an important daily activity in the preschool classroom. There are so many things that happen during circle time. Children listen to a story, learn who is present and absent, discuss the daily schedule, talk about special happenings in their lives, find out about new materials in the classroom, and perhaps, sing a song or do a movement activity.

In our daily circle times, we are constantly learning together! This special time helps establish a sense of community among members of our class, and enables us to officially start the day!

For this activity, we used a story board to tell the story of I Like Me. Before we started, each child was given a piece of the story made of felt.

As the story was read, students would bring their part of the story up to the board. This enabled each child to identify different sections, relate to plot details, and become a part of the story!

One of the first things children learn to write is their name.

It’s the easiest for them to learn and you’ll find they want to learn because it’s the one word they hear most often.

It is a word all their own because it represents their identity. During the course of our Name Week, we wrote our name in several different ways.

For this activity, we wrote our names using school buses! Using pre-cut puzzle pieces, students placed name letters in order, spelling their names in the process!

This week, we focused on the many ways we write our name! Using paint brushes, markers, and other writing implements, your little ones identified the correct way to spell their name! All of their work was compiled into name books.

In our classroom, we are constantly documenting things: what we do, how we learn, and the processes that define our week. Documentation does just that, and is important for several reasons. For one, an effective piece of documentation tells the story and the purpose of an event, experience or development.

It is a product that draws others into the experience – evidence or artifacts that describe a situation, tell a story, and help the viewer to understand the purpose of the action. Secondly, documentation displays a child’s progress throughout the course of their academic careers. Lastly, documentation extends the learning process beyond the classroom to the home.

When a child brings their work home, they are able to discuss it with parents and siblings. When two or more people discuss an event, each brings a new perspective and level of depth. This is so important for the preschool experience!