September 15-18

The Many Emotions of the Color Monster 

We hope you enjoy your Preschool Color Monster book!

Continuing "All About Me"

Choosing and Cutting our Hair Color

We practice our fine motor skills often in preschool! These key finger and hand movements are important for manipulative experiences and writing. The children also practice hand-eye coordination as they work their fingers into different positions and movements. This week's fine motor work focused on cutting skills. This is a developing skill in preschool, and we work with the children to put their fingers in the right place, turn their hand in the right direction and make slow and aimed cuts. You can review the stages of cutting skills HERE. 

The easiest way to practice cutting skills is to have the children cut out the materials we need to use for an activity. This gives their cutting work a clear purpose and goal. We started with four squares to cut out to see who was cutting straight lines and who was snipping. Either stage is appropriate at this age and we will provide many opportunities to practice cutting in different ways. There was a mixture of line cutting and snipping so the long strips of colored paper were appropriate for all of the children and actually made the activity more fun because they had to cut their hair pieces in any way that they wanted and then attach them to their heads! Each child looked at themselves in the mirror and held up the strips until they found the color(s) that most closely matched their hair color(s).

Choosing our Eye Color

Another part of our body that is clearly distinct is our eyes. We discussed how our eyes are specific colors and we have to look closely at them to determine exactly which color they are. But...we can't see our own eyes! The children decided that we could "look at each other" or "use the mirror" to see our eyes. Once we looked at each other, we got out the long mirror. One by one, the children came up and looked in the mirror and talked about what they saw. Then they focused on our eyes and what color they were. As colors were identified, we referred to the piles of eye colors on the table to see if we could find a match. Once a match was found, we double checked with the mirror, and then brought it back to the table to glue on our sheet. 

Check out the children's growing writing development! We've observed them over the past week and gave them the task of writing their name at the stage they are currently at. Five children successfully traced and three children successfully wrote by looking at their name card. As these skills grow and strengthen we will move them along in their writing development. All of the children finding success in this writing experience at this point in the year is fantastic! They were very proud of themselves 😃