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May- Full of Excitement and Growth!

After faithfully keeping an eye on our little batch of eggs in the incubator for a full 3 weeks, they finally hatched!  And what a miraculous thing that was!  The children, teachers, and parents were all in amazement as right before our eyes, these tiny little creatures worked so hard to break out of their shells and begin to move around!  This was a first at our preschool and it was truly incredible!

When they were all a few days old, the children got to carefully touch them and feel just how fluffy baby chicks are!

We kept them in our classroom for a couple of weeks and the children were enthralled with observing them!

We also learned about seeds and plants in preschool.  It was neat to see how different each type of seed is and then see what it would grow in to.  Hands on learning is the best! 

We worked on scissor skills as we cut out the stages of a plant's life and then put them in order and glued them on.

We also played our roll-a-flower game to reinforce the parts of a flower as well as number recognition with our dice rolling game.  They took turns rolling the dice and adding that part of the flower to the one they were putting together.

 

 Cathy Erdmann, an amazingly talented local artist, came to each of our classes to teach us about clay and sculptures.  She showed the children many different sculptures and the process of making a sculpture.

 

Cathy helped the children use Polymer clay to make a special magnet flower for their moms.

Happy Mother's Day!!!  I wish we could've taken pictures of each of our kids' wonderfully amazing moms, but here's just a few!  What would our world be like without the devotion and love of our moms?  Thanks for all you do!

 

This spring we also learned about flowers.  The children enjoyed painting big flowers that they could take home!  The older kids make their flowers by wrapping paper to make it colorful and unique!

 

 

Since we had caterpillars in our classroom this spring, the children loved acting out the life cycle of a butterfly, pretending they were caterpillars busily eating and crawling, then standing so still as chrysalises, and then flapping their arms and "flying" around the room!

 We watched as they grew from tiny little caterpillars to big caterpillars, then observed them as chrysalises and waited patiently until they emerged.  They came out during our last week of preschool!  Perfect timing by our beautiful butterflies!

 Our Pre-Kindergarten kids worked on learning their phone numbers!  In today's world of cell phones and technology, learning phone numbers is not as common as before.  But it is still very important for children to know at least one of their parent's phone numbers.  We even practiced dialing on our pretend cell phones!

I love how much the children enjoy playing with our kitchen sets.  Cooking, pretending, and playing family roles as they develop social skills at preschool!

These cuties worked so hard on this challenging puzzle!  Yeah for teamwork!

The end of the year is always so bittersweet when we have graduation for our Pre-Kindergarten students.  They all worked so hard this year and grew so much physically, academically, socially, and emotionally.  They are ready for Kindergarten!  Thank you for all your support of these precious children!  They know they're loved by so many!

 What a great year!

Carnival!

This year's end of school year celebration was wonderful!   The kids loved the fish pond and all the other activities and games!

Busily making a ladybug project! 

Thank you to all who contributed to and bought items from our bake sale!  

The kids always look forward to getting their face painted by our amazing face painter, Elena Lacayo.

Thanks to all who attended and helped make our carnival such a great success!  We had such a good turnout and a great time celebrating another fantastic year!

Spiders, Insects and Easter!

What a special treat!!!!  Each of our classes got a surprise visit from the Easter Bunny!!  He hid eggs for the kids and they were very excited to collect them in their little bunny bags they made!  Holidays are magical times to create lasting memories and spark creativity!

We learned about more animals in April starting with spiders!  The children really enjoyed Eric Carle's story of "The Very Busy Spider" and feeling the raised spider web in the book!

After we learned that spiders use their webs to catch their food, we made a class-sized spider web and filled it with insects.  The kids took turns walking their spider along the web and catching its' prey.

We also learned about insects and how they differ from spiders.  We had lots of practice counting legs to see if it was an insect with 6 legs or a spider with 8.  

We made our own little insect color books to practice colors, reinforce our knowledge of insects, and practice reading with simple words.

This little preschooler was quite proud of herself after she put this puzzle with insects and bugs on it.  Puzzles are a great way to strengthen eye-hand-coordination, develop problem solving skills, and build self confidence!

For one of our projects, we split into small groups and played some insect and bug board games.  This game reinforced what we learned about ladybugs and that they love to eat aphids on roses.  The kids practiced number recognition and one-to-one correspondence as they moved their ladybug along the board collecting and counting aphids as they went.

We extended our learning and played a separate class game where the kids took turns being either ladybugs or aphids.  The ladybugs had to fly around our classroom and find all the aphids to eat.  They love make believe and learning through play!

This bug game is a great cooperative game and helps children work on identifying colors, shapes, counting and working together!  

As part of our insect unit, we focused on butterflies.  This boy loved this great life cycle book!

We introduced the concept of symmetry when we made beautiful butterflies after we talked about that real butterflies are symmetrical with their wing designs.  The kids chose the shapes and colors they wanted for their own unique design and did a great job making the wings symmetrical.

Another exciting thing we did as part of our discovery of animals was incubating real chicken eggs at our preschool!  The 21 days that we had to wait were filled with anticipation as the kids checked on the eggs each day!  

Luckily, one class got to see their classmate's baby chicks already hatched!  So fun!

We also had a pet dog come visit one class.  We love meeting the other members of the kids' families that they often talk about at preschool!

As always, we love when Mother Goose comes for story time!  The kids are always enthralled with her visits and all the special things she brings!

The Pre-Kindergarten kids got to paint with Q-tips when it was "Q" week.  They were so careful as they painted with this unique medium.  

As you can see, we also learned the letter V!

Outside fun!  This class had a blast as they tried to catch bubbles from the bubble machine!  Thanks for sharing your bubble maker for the day, Ryan!

Recess benefits children in so many ways.  Children need unstructured time to run, play, imagine, and rest from academic learning.  Here's a link to a great article entitled "The Crucial Role of Recess in School" published by the American Academy of Pediatrics: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/131/1/183.full.pdf
  At Treasure Tree Academy, we know how important recess is and make time for it each day.