Fall Fest

Fall Fest was a wonderful time this year with lots of laughter and big smiles! Our Fall Fest included a petting zoo, pumpkin painting, trunk-or-treat, and face painting. Our teachers and families worked together to make this event a successful one for all of our kiddos! We loved that a handful of families came by to join the fun and tour the school, as well! We are looking forward to all the other fall festivities headed our way over the next several weeks!

Exploring Weight and Height

Pre K children learned about their ability to think using problem solving skills and brainstorming! They compared attributes using heights, weights, and volumes of various items in the classroom. With a focus on respecting their desire to play, our curriculum achieves the goal of exposing our youngest learners to core mathematics and science skills. 

Tactile Path

 This week Preschool One focused their learning on their legs, feet, and toes! Teachers created a tactile path complete with feathers, water, pompoms, yarn, and more! For this activity the children were asked to take their socks and shoes off, which they LOVE to do! Teachers guided the children along the path while describing the textures beneath their feet. 

Later, the children sang songs about walking feet and read a book about a super fast Gingerbread Man! Our feet can be fast and slow and they help us do amazing things! 

 

Community Car Seat Safety Check

As a service to our families, we partnered with Franklin Fire Department and hosted a car seat safety check! The Car Seat Safety Techs ensured that car seats were installed correctly and that children were in the safest seat option for them. Parents enjoyed asking questions and having general conversation with the experts to ease their minds about traveling with their little ones! 

Using Attributes to Describe the World Around Me

 Our preschool children have spent the week using attributes to describe the world around them. They learned that attributes are used to sort or categorize. Children naturally look at objects and notice similarities and differences. Through this type of child-led play, their teacher is able to enhance their language by providing them with words to describe what they are noticing and have conversations about the connections that they discover. Below you will see the many opportunities that their own curiosities were beautifully turned into teachable moments! 

Monday they learned about the attributes of their faces. They created self portraits and hung them up in their room! Later they practiced using their nose for smelling and discussed what they used their hands for throughout the day! They learned that their hands help keep them safe while playing on the playground and help them greet their friends when they arrive at school with fist bumps, hugs, and high fives. 

 

They connected their learning from Monday to new experiences like exploring leaves and apples! They noticed that leaves have many different attributes. They used flexible thinking to discover different ways to categorize their leaves. Then they noticed that leave have lines just like their hands. So, they painted and stamped with their hands, and then with the leaves! What a great connection for a child! With the apples they discovered that there were far more similarities than differences. So they painted the apples to give them a variety of attributes and stamped with those, too! I love this example of adaptable lesson planning. Open ended plans, in this case, truly reflect the nature of child-led learning. 

 The children chose their own dress up clothes and compared similarities and differences. 

 

Let's Build Together

 It's Demo Day! This week we focused on building! We loved exploring different building materials and using our problem and solution thinking skills to see how tall our structures could become! We all know the best part of building a huge tower is KNOCKING IT DOWN! Check out the awesome wrecking balls created by our teachers. These were used to enhance our block centers throughout Let's Build It Week! Teachers also incorporated fine motor movement with hammering golf tees and tinkering with nuts and bolts. We ended the week with a family engagement take & make activity. 

Camp Academy

 This is one of everyone's favorite weeks of the summer! Camp Academy where friendships thrive and the outdoors make us feel alive! This week our children expressed their creativity through crafting their own tie dye t-shirts and other camp crafts, sat around a campfire and sang along with camp classics, created their own lanterns (that really work!), fine tuned their fine motor muscles with friendship bracelet making, went on hikes and pretended to go boating, and filled their tummy with s'mores (because the world could use 'smore' kids like them)! It has been a week of wholesome fun.