Meeting Families, Eating from the Garden

This week in preschool we moved from learning about ourselves to learning about our families. The kids made family portrait rubbings by using sandpaper cutouts of people and pet shapes. They found a shape for each person and pet in their houses. After arranging them on the table, a teacher placed a piece of paper over the sandpaper shapes. Then, the kids used the side of an unwrapped crayon to rub over the shapes. Like magic, the people and pets showed through. When they were done rubbing, the kids named everyone and we had a representation of the people who live in each of the kids' houses.
The other ongoing activity this week was weeding the preschool garden and harvesting some of the vegetables from the community garden. Whatever we harvested, we brought to the science table to look at with magnifying glasses. We cut gourds in two, pulled broccoli apart, and tasted everything. We also made zucchini bread on Tuesday from a giant zucchini from the garden. Most kids like it when they tasted it on Wednesday.
We had our first visit from the Bookmobile this week, as well. The kids met Tasha, a volunteer on the Bookmobile. We sang a few songs and then she read us a book about apples. After the story, everyon was allowed to choose a book to borrow from this library on wheels. The kids put their book in a special book bag to keep track of that book over the next four weeks.

Week #2: The face of preschool.

We spent last week working on our faces. First, the kids made a round shape for a teacher to cut out. Then we used various shades of skin color paint to figure out what matched each student. Some kids were peach mixed with almond or chocolate, others were hazelnut mixed with olive, and others were straight peach or caramel. It was fun to figure out what shade we were.
After the paint dried on our shapes, we colored and cut out our facial features (eyes, nose, mouth) and made hair from rick rack or yarn.
When we were all done, Beth put them up on the wall. Next to the faces she put a drawing each child made at small group. Everyone thought of something they know how to do really well. They drew a picture and Beth wrote the words. This connected back to the book, Now I'm Big. In that book, kids talk about how they needed a lot of help when they were little babies, but now that they are big, they can do many things for themselves.
This whole activity also connects back to our word of the day on Wednesday, which was unique. As the kids discovered their special skin color and made their own pieces of their face, they found that each one of them was unique. No one else in the class was exactly the same.

First Day 2009

Here are a few photos from the the first day of preschool.

Kids found their way through the activities in the classroom and outside.

Some worked on puzzles.

At science, they explored the attraction of magnets to each other and to some metal objects. There were a lot of choices in blocks and manipulatives. Kids were making buildings, playing with the bucket of dogs, and rolling toy cars down the road map on the floor.

Outside, they tried the balance beam, learned how to descend the fire pole, went swinging across the monkey bars, and playing on the different structures with slides and climbers.

At small group time, everyone made a cut out of their hand in fall colors. Then, we put those cut outs on the classroom tree to be fall leaves.

We spent the rest of the day learning the routine and rules at school. Students learned about how the job chart works and how to sit, listen and take turns talking at meeting time. They found their special spaces: their coat hooks and cubbies. Everyone had a chance to write in their own name practice book.

We are just beginning to learn about each other and we are all working on learning the names of our new friends.