Pet Study!

HandwritingWithoutTears

Part of Pre-Ks curriculum is Handwriting Without Tears and we started working in our Kick Start Kindergarten workbook. We teach in the following developmental order: vertical and horizontal, magic C, big and little curves, and diagonals. We begin with capital letters as a group, seperate from lowercase. Instead of teaching 52 letter symbols with different sizes, positions and confusing starting places, we divide and conquer and start with 26. This week we started with F. The reason we start with F is because of the simplicity with lines and the amount of steps it takes to make the letter.

Alphabet&NumberPunchCards

Using a hole punch is a great way for students to develop their hand strength and hand-eye coordination. Most children love it, too. If the holes fall out onto the table or floor, picking them up allows children to refine their pincer grasp as well! We will do this same activity every Tuesday as I introduce our letter and number of the week.

FlowerColoring

Science content during early childhood focuses on living things (life science), the physical properties of materials and objects (physical science), and Earth's environment and how we care for it (earth science). This week we focused on life science with a flower experiment and the the best way to learn science is to do science through integrated hands-on child-centered inquiry. Young children are natural investigators, they are curious how things work and what will happen next. We did a flower experiment to go along with our letter of the week F. We talked about the parts of the flower and made predictions whether or not the flower would drink the colored water and if it would turn our petals the same color as the water. Each child picked the colored vase they wanted and placed a flower in it.

Students will be doing several activities in their fine motor journals. We will be making various types of lines, letters, numbers, and their names using different techniques. Tactile perception is the brains ability to understand information coming from the skin, particularly the hands being used to register sensory information. We used our fingers and ink pads to stamp inside the letter F.