Community Helpers

Last week we discussed community helpers and careers. We started with fire safety and read many, many books, but here's a couple that were popular:



 In Pre-K 1 we made shape fire trucks. This craft is a sneaky critical thinking activity. We made one fire truck together as a class and then provided all the pre-cut pieces. The peas were asked to attempt to reconstruct the truck to look like the first one. Then they could personalize their trucks by drawing firefighters on their pictures.

Finished product:

We also discussed stop, drop and roll and talked about what smoke alarms are. We challenged the peas to go home and locate their smoke alarm (or fire alarm) in their homes. We discussed what to do if you were ever in a place filled with smoke from a fire. You have to crawl on the floor! We practiced by crawling under a blanket.

This activity was a hit. We did it more than one day. :)



Pre-K 2 talked about traffic safety and made these stoplights!

They learned how to trace, cut and glue on their own. 

They even added words to their lights!

Pretty impressive, guys!

Both classes enjoyed a stoplight snack craft. They were a big treat since we used frosting and m&m's to make them.

Pre-K 2 began working on writing numbers since we will be introducing our daily math books soon.





They continued to work on writing names,

and used their number writing practice to do a community helper counting sheet.

Both classes also started our Handwriting Without Tears curriculum this week, too. You can check out their site here. 

 Pre-K 1 introduced our literacy buckets this week. The peas have been begging to work with the buckets, but we introduce them slowly so we can model how to use the materials. They were thrilled when they found out they were going to be open this week.

We continued morning messages as well and worked on writing letter A.

 After discussing some careers/community helpers, we discussed some ways we could use our centers to explore different careers. The peas decided that we could make our home center into a restaurant. We added a chef hat, menus and aprons.

 It got a lot of business.

 

 After discussing doctors and how they care for us we made doctor bags in Pre-K 1 for fun and to use in our imaginative play.

 

 Ms. Amy put out her astronaut set and we used the space station.

 

One of the most popular centers all week was the Engineering and Construction center. We discussed how engineers use blueprints as a plan for buildings. Then a construction crew works to build the building. We planned and then built many structures. Here are a few:

And we built and built...

 

Pre-K 2 had some really great engineers, too. Everyone worked together!

We definitely had a busy week full of hands on learning and I'm confident these sweet peas can grow up to be anything they set their minds to!

Back to School at the ECDC!

Even though many friends returned to school last week, this week was our official start to our normal routines in our classrooms! We celebrated back to school with our Outback at the ECDC week! In Pre-K 1 we talked about schools and spent some time constructing schools of our own in blocks.

 

  Pre-K 2 did some building, too!

We spent time exploring our classrooms and learning centers and played with our new friends.

We explored our home center with fabulous dress up options,

and we did quite a bit of reading!

We also began our morning messages this week. If you would like to know more about how morning messages enrich our classrooms in literacy and print awareness, you can read about it here. Below are a few of the morning messages we introduced this week!

Sometimes the morning messages consist of our thoughts about a topic or group discussion. Other times they are very interactive. Eventually children will respond to the morning messages independantly with their own words and pictures!

  

We read Chrysanthemum this week and discussed how to treat our classmates with kindness. We also talked a lot about names since we are getting to know eachother!

In Pre-K 1 we made a name/picture matching game!

Friends could match pictures to names and then make their own names out of tiles. 

 

 This center was a pretty big hit!

 

 Pre-K 2 graphed the number of letters they had in their names.

While we were discussing names and letters, we did a lot of alphabet activities!

We even stamped our names into playdough!

 

And we added letters to the sand table!

 

In art we made name flowers. The sweetpeas loved getting to write and paint. 

 They did all their art independantly!

 

 They were very proud of thier work when they were done!

We also read this favorite story:

 

 Pre-K 2 discussed elements of the story as a group.

They also made their own kissing hand!

One of Pre-K 1's morning messages asked the class to trace and color their hands.

 

We assessed cutting and counting skills with a quick Chester the Racoon math sheet.

We were very impressed with Pre-K 1's scissor skills!

 
We also read this book:

It's a very sweet way to talk about how we make others feel. We can fill their bucket by showing kindness and using nice words, or you can empty someone's bucket by hurting their feelings or leaving them out. We made our own buckets to remind us that we want to fill our friends buckets up with kindness!

 

 We're hanging up our buckets on the wall!

To wrap up the week we read Pete the Cat-Rocking in My School Shoes

 We sure love Pete the Cat!

Since we do an awful lot of rocking in Pre-K 1, we decided to make a class book! We gave each sweetpea a paper to fil their name into this sentence:

 Next we took pictures of everyone's shoes. Here's a few! I will glue the pictures onto the pages later to make our first class book! 

 We also graphed the color of our shoes in our graphing chart. Here it is in progress:

 We had such a fun week in Pre-K 1 & 2 getting to each other. We have talked about big problems and little problems, discussed how to move in centers, learned how to pour our own water and accomplished a great many other things. The year is off to a wonderful start and we look forward to a great year in Pre-K!