Sunday, October 18, 2020

Preschool in the time of a world wide Pandemic

Our classes are smaller and we do lots of hand washing and disinfecting of surfaces, but life moves forward.  And luckily amid all the other changes this year, 3 and 4 year olds are still what they have always been: full of energy and questions and excited about every new experience.  Here are just a few things we worked on in Sept. 2020 along with some cute pics!

We learned to identify our names and began writing them by following the dotted lines.


We learned the names and sounds of A, B, C and D.  We sang about the sounds, played games like burping when you hear a word that begins with the letter B, practiced writing the letters and did art projects that reinforced the letter sounds.
We started learning the names of numbers 1-4, learned rhymes that helped us remember how to write them like "around a tree, around a tree that's the way to make a 3", filled bubble numbers with beans and other things so that we would remember how those numbers "feel" and for the older students we did counting pages and games.
We learned how to use a mouse on the computer and how to navigate to play the games we like best like color by number, building a pizza and knocking down a building made of letters.







We built objects with legos, waffle blocks, magnetic tiles and other building materials.

We each have our own playdough and used it to strengthen our hands and practice sight words like "and" and "are".  We have songs for both of those songs too.





 

We made new friends and learned their names by doing the rhyme "biddely, diddley, bumble bee won't you say your name for me?" 

We worked on pages for the ABC book that we will continue making throughout the school year.
We learned and sang lots of new songs.  One of them was about being BRAVE, because that was the theme for September.
We played in the dramatic play center with a kitchen and food, a cradle and dolls.  Pretending with friends is one of our favorite things.

We learned to each do jobs every day from the job chart.  Sometimes we're the weather person who also dresses Bobby Bear for playing outside.



Some of the other jobs they have are Guessing Can where they hide an object in a large can (think 5 lbs of flour) and then give clues to the other kids who try to guess what is hidden.  Usually the object begins with the letter of the week.








Snack time is definitely one of the favorite times of each day.  I always read them a book.  Here are just a few of our favorites.  "Ten Apples up on Top", "The Bravest Fish",  "Rufus goes to school", "You get what you get", "Max the Brave", "Be who you are" and "Chrysanthemum".



We painted with watercolors and  tempera paints and brushes.















We practiced counting the number of times we rolled a certain object on our special die.



And we matched shapes and numbers!

We even painted one day with soap bubbles when we were studying the letter Bb.





Then we blew bubbles in our chocolate milk at snack time.




We played outside every day too.  We soaked up the sun, ran, blew bubbles, threw balls around, drew with chalk and played on the playset.





Several of the students had September birthdays and we made them our SUPERSTARS near those birthdays complete with fun treats and crowns!


We did puzzles!


                                  We made "All About me" books.


It was a very busy first month and we're just getting started.