Back from Winter Break!

The preschool took a long break over Thanksgiving and Christmas this year so that we could welcome this little ladybug into our family. It has been such a special time for us!

This week we started up class again after the break, and it has been so fun to add teaching back into my week. I really just love planning lessons, being in the classroom, and interacting with the kids. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to run my own program so that I can balance this passion with my family life as well. 

Anyway- we started off the New Year by exploring winter and snow. Thanks to some great storms over the holidays, we still have a lot of it around! 

Snowflake Art

One favorite activity was using pipettes to squeeze colored water onto the coffee filter snowflakes we made earlier.

This was a great process for using fine motor skills, mixing colors, and just exploring with water.

We discovered that when the snowflakes dried, the color mostly just stayed around the edges. One student was a little disappointed that his snowflake didn't turn out to be all blue like he had colored it. In the future I might experiment with some different mediums to see what saturates the filter with color more effectively. 

Painting Snow Sensory Bin

This activity is so easy to set up, and always a hit with the kids. Just watercolors and snow!

Hot Chocolate Counting

We are working on counting through the teen numbers this month, and I love how these counting mats visually reinforce one-to-one correspondence and the break-down of these numbers into tens and ones. I pulled out some tweezers to add some fine motor challenge to this activity as well.

 Sometimes I've noticed that kids aren't always interested in counting activities like these at first. So often I will initially just set them out for the kids to freely explore, but then I will initiate some sort of simple game that applies the skills. Things like racing a friend or using dice to decide how many to put on at a time can really increase their level of engagement.

When I set up this center, I just scattered the counting mats around and didn't pay attention to number order. But during clean up time, I noticed one student carefully counting and rearranging the cups so they were in the correct order! I love watching kids apply their knowledge independently and interacting with materials in ways that I had not thought of before. :)