NEWSLETTER

All About Me!

We start to build our classroom community right away in preschool, and we start with the most important people! We use conversations and interactions with manipulatives to get to know each other and to begin to recognize our similarities and differences. We began by looking at pictures of ourselves and describing what we saw. This conversation provided an oral language experience for the children and a chance for them to identify and describe what they were looking at. The children identified body parts and their shapes and colors, which shows their visual-spatial awareness. We then transitioned the conversation to labeling those features with manipulatives on a new sheet with their matching pictures. First the children matched their two pictures. Then we moved to labeling specific colored features. Through visual recognition of our names and body features, we verbally identified them to each other and then physically labeled them together using glue and focused placement. The children could glue anywhere on the page as long as they could still see their picture and their name. Gluing and specific placement practices hand-eye coordination, which is important in fine motor skill development. During this process the children practiced color recognition, letter recognition and word recognition. The words are color-labeled, which gives the children a visual cue that helps them "read" each word. 

Cutting out 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. 

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. Cutting practice begins with a simple straight line, so our 4 boxes of hair color choices was a perfect material to use. The children looked at their hair in the picture and found the matching color box. Then they cut out the box in any way that they could. At this point there are many different levels of cutting skills, and this gave us a chance to see them. What they were cutting out was purposeful as well - they needed to differentiate their hair color from the rest for their picture. 

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 a 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. An interesting twist that the children added - many of them said that they needed to glue two eyes on the their paper since they have two eyes! We agreed that they were correct and they brought two eyes back to their paper. Such a great observation!