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Cute Calendar Work
There is some debate over whether calendar is really developmentally appropriate for preschoolers, so I might as well add my two cents. I do calendar every day for a couple of different reasons. The days of the week and the months of the year seem like fairly abstract concepts, but when I show the children what they look like on the calendar, they can visualize what all of these words mean. Number recognition is also something that a lot of my students struggle with, especially now that my Pre-K kiddos are getting into the teens and beyond, the more opportunities that I can come up with for them to use…
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I’m back!
Hi everyone, I am so excited to be back to this blog of mine! A lot has happened since I last posted, and I have some big ideas for using this little space, so I hope you’ll stay with me for this journey. Because of all of the changes, both in my life, and to my blog, I feel the need to start over a bit. So here is a little introduction for those of you who are new to preschool ponderings: I’m Erin. I recently started a non-profit Early Learning Center with a group of incredible Early Childhood Teachers. When i’m not teaching myself how to use Quickbooks, figuring…
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Fort-building 101
This week our dramatic play area has been turned into a fort-building paradise. The children were building forts with our tablecloths anyway, so we decided to specify an area for this. We included a large number of different sized pieces of fabric, some large blocks and tall sticks, and random pieces of furniture that they could cover. I love building forts, I remember doing this wen I was little, and I think that every child needs to have this opportunity. I also love to watch the children in my class build forts because I can see their gears turning as they use their problem solving skills to figure oh what…
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Valentine math game
This is a super easy number recognition and matching game that I found on Pinterest and adapted for our classroom. I’ll tell you my version, and you can check out my pin boards for the original! First I traced a large heart on a sheet of paper, then I made 15 dots around the edge of the heart with a bingo marker. You could do more or less depending on the needs of your class, my guys really need to work on the teens. I then used the same color bingo marker to mark the bottoms of 15 Hershey kisses. I made three game using three different colors so that…
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Calendar work with Preschoolers
For many classrooms calendar is an essential part of the daily routine, and while I won’t go into the argument of whether this is developmentally appropriate or not, I do want to show you all something that we have in our classroom that the children love. When we began our birthday project, the first thing that we put up was a birthday calendar – each month got its own piece of paper with each child’s birthday, the birthdays are colored in so that the children can easily recognize which days are birthdays. This has helped the children really visualize the year and understand when their own birthdays are. We use…
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It’s a birthday… everyday
To a preschooler there are two important days every year, Christmas, and their birthday. In our classroom we had two birthdays to celebrate right after Winter break, and ever since our class has been consumer with every thing birthdays. Even the children who don’t have a birthday for 6 more months are excitedly planning their own parties (and I do apologize to their parents)! It seemed only natural that we make this a tangible part of our classroom, so today we introduced birthday items into our dramatic play area. We included birthday plates, cups, and napkins, special ice cream bowls and an ice cream scoop, birthday candles, cupcake wrappers, gift…
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It’s cold outside!
It has finally gotten cold and snowy in our neck of the woods, which means no more outdoor play time and planning lots of extra activities to keep our energetic kiddos busy. Here are a couple o the things that we have been working on: Masking tape resist snowflakes: simply use making tape to make snowflake shapes on a piece of white paper, then let the children paint over the tape. We used different shades of blue paint with a little extra sparkle, but silver or gray would be pretty too! When the pint has dried you can peel the tape off and you have white snowflakes. Name snowmen: this…
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Have you heard of smilebox?
We have been searching for an easy way to share pictures with parents and we are in love with smilebox! It’s an incredible website that lets you fill cute scrapbook, slide show, and photo album templates with your own photos and share them through email. Smilebox also lets you print your creations so we always print ours to have in the classroom as class books. Smilebox also has templates for newsletters, invitations, and stationary, and teachers can use it for FREE! It doesn’t get better than that! www.smilebox.com
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Shadow puppets
Finding new materials to use on the light table is something that I always have a hard time with, but when I saw some gorgeous shadow puppets on pinterest I was psyched to try shadow puppets on the classroom. Some of my children have been talking about their own shadows, now that we have some spring sunshine, and I remember enjoying shadow play myself when I was very young. If you search shadow puppets on pinterest you will find some very beautiful examples, but they were a bit too elaborate for my needs. I made these by printing some clip art animal shapes and tracing them onto black card stock.…
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Uses for leftover plastic eggs
Here is a great idea for you after Easter clearance finds! We used our plastic eggs to make math matching game. Here are the super simple instructions: take two sets of plastic eggs, one large size and one mini size, match up the colors and place number stickers, matching numbers on matching colors. This is an amazingly easy game that can be played in a number of different ways1. Matching the large number eggs with the small number eggs, when you make a match you get to put the small egg inside the bigger one.2. For your younger children just have them match the colors.3. Add a smaller manipulative (ex:plastic…
