October has been a fun and interesting month for the Preschoolers.
We started of by exploring colours and then focused specifically on the colour ‘yellow’. The children brought in yellow objects for our weekly ‘Show-and-time’ as well as yellow images from magazines to make a collage. We made a big display for the classroom with yellow objects found in class which we attached to big ‘Y E L L O W ‘ letters. We then painted paper plates yellow to make a smiley sun face which really brightened up the classroom.
Ist Project – In a very simplistic way, we introduced the concept of caring for the environment and recycling. The children were able to grasp the idea of seperating rubbish in to three main categories; plastic, paper and food. For example, after a morning session of practising cutting skills, the children tidied up putting all paper into one bin. During a cooking lab session in class where we made ‘fruit skewers’, they put all remianing food waste in to another bin. We had another bin for plastic waste, but thankfully there was very little in that one!
To help the children understand the concept of pollution in the sea, we filled two transparent containers with water; one with clear water and a second with dirty water where we added bits of plastic. We hung 2 fish from a stick and string in each container and explained to the children that the fish in the clear water were ‘happy fish’ while the fish in the ‘dirty water’ were sad; this was a very basic way to explain pollution to very young children but they were able to grasp the idea. One child suggested that I take the fish from the dirty water container and put them in the clean clear water container so they would be happy! : )
For our craft activity we made fish with old straws and then decorated the page by finger painting with lots of colours; the children thought this made the fish ‘happy’ ! The children brought in lots of bottle tops from home which we used for colour sorting as well as for a math activity (1-5) using pom poms and acorns.
Fine motor skills: activities to help develop and refine fine motor skills are very important in the early years and in Preschool these are presented daily to children. During cooking lab we made faces using rice crackers and raisins and made Hallowwen themed biscuits such as pumpkins, bats and ghosts. Children really enjoyed the activity with ‘bucatini and ditaloni’ pasta and shown great concentration and enthusiasm during this.
The week leading up to halloween was very fun; we practised fine motor skills with pincers to move spiders and eyeballs from webbed baskets and children loved the sensorial activities with slimey jelly and slippery spaghetti where they had to pick out creepy crawlies, worms and mice! We made black bats from toilet rolls tubes and hand print cat pictures for our craft activities. Everyone came dressed in costume for the Halloween party and brought lots of fab snacks to enjoy!
In November we will be exploring the topics of ‘Clothes & accessories’, ‘Autumn’ and ‘Shapes’. See you all soon!