First Week of preschool

We had a great first week of preschool. The children had fun checking out the different areas of the classroom. The house area and block area were very busy and they enjoyed painting on the easel, gluing designs and playing on the new playground. The first day of school we had play dough that changed color and that was magical.

Welcome to the new school year!

Welcome families to Calais preschool. I look forward to seeing you at the Meet and Greet on Monday, August 28th, 4:30-5:30 pm. We are going to have fun this year.

Planting fun

Today we continued our plant unit with dissecting a plant. We worked in teams of two and used our sense of smell, touch, and vision to discover the plants. We used magnifying glasses to see the inside of the stem, veins of the leaves and pollen. We used descriptive words to describe what we were discovering. When we wer finished, each team used the pieces of the plant to make a design.

January Fun

We have had fun learning about snow, ice and animals in winter. The children love doing winter experiments such as seeing if packed snow or fluffy snow melts fastest. Sledding has been too dangerous this month with all the icy weather but the children have had fun making snow cakes and painting in the snow.

We have also been working on recognizing letters and the sounds of letters. We had lots of laughs making letters with our bodies. The children have been building letters with wood pieces that are lines and curves.

In math we have been looking for patterns and have made some discoveries using the calendar. There was great excitement when someone found that the the numbers 1-9 repeat in the ones column but also in the tens column. We have also been using the pattern blocks to make designs and the block area has been busy with children designing buildings and ramps.

Playing instruments in music

Shaving cream snow

Mazes

Pre-Holiday Fun

We have been having fun learning about holidays around the world and finding those countries on the globe. We have learned about Saint Nicholas Day and the story behind " a baker's dozen". We have counted to ten and said " Good Morning" in French, German, and Spanish when we learned about the celebrations in France, Germany and Mexico. We also had a snowman piñata that the children had fun trying to break to celebrate Las Posadas in Mexico. We made dragon puppets to celebrate the Chinese New Year and learned that red is a lucky color in China. We saw how close Sweden and Russia are to the North Pole and that there is very little daytime at this time of year. We also learned about the miracles of Chanukah and  how to play the dreidel game.

Trying to break the piñata.

Joanne teaching us how to play the dreidel game.

Playing the dreidel game.

Pumpkin Fun

This week we learned about pumpkins. We used descriptive words to describe them, we guessed how much string would go around a pumpkin, we measured pumpkins and we had fun making pumpkin designs with glue and paint. 

We also had a visit from Nicole from Kellogg Hubbard Library. She read some monster books and then we made some monster puppets.

Apple fun

This week we used apples for many activities. We made apple prints, bowled with apples, tried to stack apples, and best of all we made apple cider. A big thank you to the Dodge family for sharing their cider press so we could make cider!