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This week we have been focusing on the understory layer of the rainforest! Our November theme for our Experience Preschool curriculum from Experience Early Learning is Explore the Rainforest. We have been talking about animals and things that they would see in this layer. We've learned how chocolate is made, learned how praying mantis like to blend into nature and stay still to protect themselves, and that geckos lose their tails when they are trying to escape predators (and that they eventually grow back)! We learned a new song, played math games and introduced new letters this week. This isn't all we've learned, it's been a fun and busy week at preschool!
One of our favorite creative art projects this week was Aboriginal Dot Art, in lesson eight. This creative art project was part of our gecko topic. We learned that aboriginal dot art is thousands of years old and that the dots represent animals, patterns, symbols, etc. To complete this project the children were given a gecko cutout, paper and a cotton swab along with three colors of paint. Thank you to Experience Early Learning for providing all but the paint and glue - we appreciate it! They glued their gecko down and got to work making their dot designs. I am saving these for their portfolios!
Most of the children chose to only do dots on the gecko. The colors were fun and they did a really good job doing just dots - this was tricky as sometimes they would get going and start painting with the cotton swab! The children spent quite a bit of time with this project, you could tell that this was a calming activity for them. They chose how they were going to place their gecko on the paper and got to work making dots.
For our Praying Mantis topic in lesson 10, we played Hidden Numbers - a fun math lesson! This went along with our learning because we learned how praying mantis blend into nature to hide from predators. I hid numbers behind the hexagon - our shape this month - and the children had to guess which number was hiding behind the leaves. They had so much fun with this activity that we played it several times. We made a praying mantis headband which sparked great ideas through dramatic play! They started pretending that they were a praying mantis and we practiced staying still and blending in to our surroundings. We talked about how we can move our body into different shapes and what we could do to help us blend in to what is around us.
World Kindness Day
Friday, November 13th is World Kindness Day. At preschool we are always learning what being kind means and how we can be a kind friend, but I took some time today to tell them that it is also important to be kind to ourselves. We made kindness rainbows and I asked them to tell me five things that they would say describes them. I love the things that they said about themselves! This was an important reminder that it is not only important to be kind to others, but ourselves too.
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