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!

Young children are brimming with passionate energy, and have a need to expel the creative images forever simmering within their minds. Often times the wild play that preschoolers can engage in comes from the need to externalize their imagination. In the context of the preschool classroom, a great way to help a child reach their full creative self is to guide them through different theater games.

Age appropriate games help the child to explore the depths of their own creations as well as open themselves up to the ideas and thoughts of others. For this particular activity, we used monster masks that we had previously created in class, to play a silly form of the game Charades. Each child acted out the kind of monster they wanted to emulate, as their classmates cheered them on. Some of our favorite monsters were the cow monster, baby monster, and grandpa monster.

Your little ones love to explore with the many science activities that we do throughout the week.

These activities not only engage your child, but explain the physical properties of objects, teach cause and effect, and provide the necessary hands-on experience most conducive to learning.

Using baking soda and vinegar, we mixed the ingredients, and poured them into our jack-o-lanterns.

This was the favorite of the week, and everyone enjoyed watching the fizzing bubbles, as they oozed out of the pumpkin faces.