|APRIL 2009 PRESCHOOL LESSON PLANS|
|What a busy month!
We finished off the Nursery Rhyme unit and went into a small Easter themed unit. We identified ovals in our environment, sampled a white egg and a brown egg to see if there was any difference in taste (The children swear there is! LOL) We painted and experimented with mixing colors, acted like bunnies and had a fun egg hunt with a special appearance from a couple Easter chicks.
|We reused empty milk jugs to make our Easter baskets for the egg hunt which tied in nicely with our "We Love Our Earth" theme! The children were encouraged to cut out hearts and then add stickers or draw things that they wanted to save the earth for. Then they dictated ways they could help keep earth clean and healthy. What a better message then this one dictated by a 5 yr old boy, " Treat the Earth how you want to be treated."|
|We spent a day or two talking about recycling and reusing products, used the letters on clean trash to identify letters and letter sounds, sampled different types of soil to see which ones would be good for planting in, dug a flower bed, planted carnations in a mini greenhouse, and did an experiment to see what happens to plants when the water gets polluted, and ate a yummy cup of dirt pudding complete with a slimy worm.|
|We used lunch bags to make these bunny headbands.|
|We also had a fun week picnicing every day! We had picnics in the park as well as backyard BBQs!|
|Right: These picnic pests needed help lining up in alphabetical order. The children were great helpers! They even helped the numbered ones to line up numerically.
Left: Fingerprints make ideal little ants scurrying across our picnic blanket. We used them to count to three over and over again, and to learned the three body parts of insects.
|Above: Sequencing Activity: How do you build a hamburger?|
|You really can't do a picnic theme without watermelons! We explored a real watermelon, estimating it's weight and how big around it was. Everyone got a chance to lift it up. We rolled it around and discussed why it would roll when a block would not. The children used their observation skills and described the watermelon to me. I wrote their words on a watermelon picture on the wall. Next, we cut it open and they again described and tasted the watermelon. We placed the cut melon on a table and the children were encouraged to paint what they saw. We had a seedless melon but it had a few black seeds in it for the children to see, feel, and count. Who knew a watermelon was so full of activities?|
|And to continue with our outdoorsy theme, we did a little "camping". We had a tent set up indoors for our dramatric play area as well as one outdoors. I made the outdoor tent using the A-frame of my porch swing and some bedsheets.|
|Empty cardboard boxes make great backpacks!
Remember, Recycle, REUSE, and reduce!
|The children each had their own bedroll for our hiking and camping adventures!|
|Making a trail mix became a math lesson. The children identified the number on the clip and counted that number of items into their baggie. Afterwards, we hiked through the house and yard and watched the wildlife (pictures posted around the room/yard) and then enjoyed our tasty trail mix.|
|Left: We spied
a lot of owls on our walk. They all were carrying around colorful letter 'O's.
Right: This is our stream that we fished in and we pretended to be raccoons and played in the water with our food and other forest items.
|More S'Mores, please!
That is what I heard over and over again on 'marshmallow day'. We used marshmallow in math by counting and sorting. We used them in science to build structures and sculpture. We painted with marshmallows, identified pictures of things that begin with the /m/ sound just like marshmallow, and, of course, ate s'mores for snack!
|The children made a beautiful mural of our camping experiences. (Notice the campfire?)|
|This site was created and is maintained by Patricia Hinton of
Greatest Resource Educational Care located in Goodyear, Arizona.
(c) Greatest Resource Educational Care, 2009
(c) Patricia Hinton, 2009