September 8-11

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. In order to add fine motor and problem solving work to the experience, we cut each child's picture into a puzzle. As they explored the pieces they realized "it's ME!" and put the puzzle together over their pictures. 

Once the puzzle was completed correctly they were asked to re-do it without the picture guide on their white card stock. The children could arrange and glue the puzzle picture 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. 

We then used this experience as an opportunity to introduce tracing, practice writing and observe each child's pencil grips. Pencil grips are an evolving and ever-changing fine motor skill in the preschool years. The more opportunities the children have to practice their grip and get feedback and help, the stronger the skill gets. Tracing builds the foundation for drawing and writing letters and words. It requires eye-teaming and hand-eye coordination to write over the highlighted lines and gives the children an opportunity to refine their pre-writing skills. Tracing helps build fine motor skills, pre-writing skills, concentration and focus, visual-spatial skills, drawing skills and creativity. We will use this resource often in preschool and gradually make the highlighted letters lighter and lighter until they are gone and the children can write the word written on a card on their own. You'll be amazed at what they can write on their own and how much this skill grows by the end of the year!