We have been exploring “scents of the season” these past couple of weeks in preschool. As we get ready for Christmas, I saw these cute pinecone trees on The Wool Acorn blog, and I thought this would be wonderful for the children to make. But I wanted to incorporate a holiday scent for the children to explore … so we made sure our pinecones were
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A good story to read to preschoolers to discuss feelings is “My Many Colored Days” by Dr. Seuss. Each day is described as a particular color, with an animal that corresponds to that feeling. The use of colors and animals helps to explain feelings in a way that children can start to understand. For example, on a yellow day there are busy, buzzing bees – and
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As soon as I saw the nature shadow boxes from Teach Preschool – I just knew we had to do this! The idea of making a shadow box can be adapted to any season (winter, spring, summer, fall or for a certain holiday). Children can collect things from nature, bring in items from home or use collage materials from school. The shadow boxes we made here
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I was very inspired to try making a “sticky table” after seeing the Pumpkin vines on the sticky table activity created by Deborah Stewart on the Teach Preschool site. I thought this would work very well with various items in nature that we have outside during this time of year. To set this up, I cut a large sheet of clear contact paper and used clear packing tape
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It’s no secret that I LOVE doing activities with “sticky paper” (AKA: clear contact paper). I usually do “sticky projects” as a small or large group activity. For this project, I decided to have children make an individual piece of artwork, and let them explore and create with the materials as they wished. To do this, each child had to have their own sticky
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Three simple materials = a great opportunity for children to explore their creativity, problem solving and fine motor skills! Right after the holidays, I had a lot of large pieces of styrofoam that was used to pack some of our Christmas gifts. Like, nice, solid blocks of styrofoam. Now, like any good preschool teacher, you don’t just THROW that kind of stuff away! So
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This challenge just seemed “irresistible” to me!! My friends Donna and Sherry over at Irresistible Ideas For Play Based Learning posted about the MAD DOT CHALLENGE they were doing along with their friend, Marc Armitage. The challenge … to take something that is completely white, give young children a bunch of DOT stickers … and let them stick to their hearts content! They loved the opportunity to just stick
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We’ve enjoyed making and experimenting homemade made play dough all year long … and by far the most favorite was the “mystery play dough” we made last week! In the “great minds think alike” category … Deborah Stewart at Teach Preschool did the same activity recently (stop by and see what her class did with their play dough). I made up a batch of homemade play dough beforehand,
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Today we brought in some seasonal items from nature along with some play dough … and just let the children have at it! We used winter nature items from our area, such as pinecones and pine branches. Since I still had some extra scented pinecones – we used those. Some of the pine branches also had a good pine scent – so this was definitely a
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