Category: Room 4

Let the Gourd Times Roll

Our little ones have been having a blast in Younger Pod this fall! Check out some highlights from our enrichment patio and outdoor classroom that will LEAF you smiling!

Enrichment Patio Library

Our friends are learning how to handle books! Turning pages with tiny hands is a major fine motor challenge. Book handling, orientation, turning pages one at a time, pointing to pictures and talking about the illustrations develop important early literacy skills.

Writing Center

Our little ones are so creative and love to color, stamp and sticker. Scribbling is so important to build dexterity and begin to understand that marks and lines can represent shapes, letters, objects, and people! We’ve been working with crayons, colored pencils, oil pastels, and chalk! As the year goes on, we’ll continue to progress using other fun materials.

Art

You’ll commonly see art alternate between table art and easel art on the patio. This intentionally engages a different set of muscles. The easel is a fantastic medium for our little ones! It allows them to take a step back and see their creation from a different perspective or physically lean in to their art.

Science and Sensory

At this age, science is sparking curiosity, exploring textures, colors, cause and effect. We are giving our little ones early exposure to a wide array of tools to manipulate and move objects around–tools like safe scissors, tweezers, scoops and measuring cups.

Dramatic Play

Pretend play expands our imagination, language and social skills! We’ve enjoyed home and kitchen, a pet shop, a farmer’s market, western and are currently enjoying a petting zoo.

Building

When we build we’re making connections, exploring cause and effect (filling and dumping), developing spacial awareness and so much more! We love to build!

Gross Motor

Movement is our favorite thing to do at two! We’re putting our muscles to work, practicing skills, developing eye-hand coordination and having fun while we do it! Our October pumpkin toss was a blast. Currently, our little ones are working on coordinating upper body movements with lower body movement via our yarn ball game. Practicing gross motor movements is so important and enables our little ones to perform everyday functions and self-help skills.

Friendship

Everyday, our little ones are practicing how to show love to each others by sharing, taking turns and of course HUGS! They especially like to help each other with their “jobs” (classroom routine tasks).

A Personal Note

It is such a joy getting to spend time with your little ones in younger pod. Their unique personalities and preferences are expressed everyday in our outdoor classroom and on the younger pod enrichment patio. The time I have with them is so special to me because I get to see their faces light up with intrigue and excitement in response to the carefully planned activities that I set-up for them everyday. I can’t adequately express just how much I value each relationship and bond that I get to build with each child. I pray for your family and your little one often!

💕

Ms. Kristen

YP Outdoor Specialist

Special Visitor Today!

Today we had the extreme privilege of a visit from B.G. Hennessy, the current author of the Corduroy books, as well as over 35 other children’s titles. She is the proud grandmother of two of our own preschool kiddos who were extremely proud to share her with us. Each classroom was blessed with an individual presentation by Mrs. Hennessy. The kids from Room 5 to 1 sat in rapt attention as she shared her fantastic and whimsical stories with us. We can’t thank her enough for her visit and sincerely hope she comes back soon.

2019 Summer Session: 2

So much to do in so little time. That’s right we have two more weeks left and our summer fun will come to an end. We want to welcome our new and returning students, we hope you enjoy the fun activities, shows and water play to come soon. May Gods blessings follow you every where you go. The children had 1st had experience making Vanilla Pudding. They poured milk, and added the pudding powder into a funnel and with the help of a few marbles and lots and lots of shaking Whaaalaah! “Vanilla Pudding.”

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FOREST CREATURES

Exploring and introducing the forest this week was fun, and to talk about the creatures we see out there was like second nature to them. The children recognized lots of animals, nature items and sleeping outdoors. How amazing it was to see the children be familiar with the outdoors “Forest” and how they connected to the beauty outside. Ooh!. We found a branch outside and brought it into our class to explore.Let’s have S’mores Fun! 🥰😎👩🏼‍🍳👨🏽‍🍳

1st SUMMER SESSION 2019

We have enjoyed our 1st week of Fun in the Sun (not so much sun 🌞). We have indeed enjoyed playing with water at the water tables measuring, pouring, scooping and splashing water while at the same time “yes, we are staying sharp learning math through these fun activities.On this week we also explored things we see or do at the Ocean. We captured sounds of the beach, ocean life, birds and different kinds of funny looking rocks.We cooked, that’s right we had fun making our simple and easy delicious tuna salad, the children thought it was delicious.

Kidspace Children’s Museum

We had a blast at our field trip to Kidspace Children’s Museum. This was the perfect field trip for our little guys in Room #4. It was a short drive from our preschool and the museum had lots of fun and age appropriate things to explore. Thank you to all our parent volunteer who made this trip an enjoyable and successful experience.

This place was filed with many safe and fun things to see, explore and do, If you have not been there, you might want to check it out, They have the Galvin Physics Forest, Imagination Workshop, Nature Exchange, Roberts Pavilion and the Outdoor play to visit and discover. The kids enjoyed both the in door and outdoors activities. 

Thank you again parents/grandparents for volunteering and joining us in this fabulous, out of the routine adventure. It was a blast!

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BAKING CORN BREADt

In class we cooked corn bread with our children in class#4. In this fun and interactive activity the children learned skills needed in life such as, social-emotional development; pride and confidence in their skills and abilities, follow directions and using thinking skills to problem solve. Physical development; spreading and mixing, skills that help develop a child’s small muscle control and eye-hand coordination, and even early concepts of math and science.  Cognitive development; Cooking inspires children’s curiosity, offering new opportunities to make predictions and observations. Language development; cooking is also a great opportunity for language development, children can match pictures to words and articulate questions inspired by their new experiences. Literacy; following written recipe with images. 

 

APPLES

Dear Parents,

Thank you for bringing all the delicious apples, your generous contribution made this apple galore an exciting successful apple-venture filled with many different activities to do with your children. We have done apple tasting, made apple dumplings, and most recently made apple sauce.

On September 27th and 28th, the children participated in apple tasting and charting. On October 3rd and 4th, we made apple dumplings and they were able to follow direction such as spreading the dough, placing the apple in the center, shaking the cinnamon and sugar, wrapping the apple with the dough, and enjoying a delicious dessert after lunch. On October 10th and 11th, we made apple sauce and the children were chopping the apples into small piece with butter knives. We are looking forward to a lot more fun activities this school year.

WINTER FUN

In January we had lots of fun discussing and exploring the different kinds of weather. We had “WINTER” this year, days that were really cold, days that were rainy and other days that were sunny. We read books about arctic animals, snow and rain. The children played with ice and animals that live in Antarctica, built some snowmen with different size boxes, dressed it up with scarves, hats and with their imagination they requested features to be added such as a face, buttons and arms. We really got to enjoy our outside play making mud piles and making lots of different molded shapes with the wet sand. As we engage in outside play, the children enjoyed a fun and messy experience with cornstarch as they discovered texture, cause and effect, and measuring. With all these experiences the children were exposed to social-emotional, cognitive, math and language skills.