Van Y Preschool Preview: Hibernation, Pretend Play, Color Mixing, Choice Time, Class "Sleepover", and Color Me Healthy

The Past Two Weeks of Preschool:

January 20-21 & January 26-29

This week we read a lot of books about migration & hibernation and what animals do in the winter. They have been very interested in this topic.

We pretended we were animals getting ready to hibernate. One day we ate lots of food, yawned, stretched, found a place to sleep, and “woke up” in the spring. Another day we were snow rabbits trying to hide from the arctic fox.
We had an indoor “snowball fight” with our paper snowballs. Inside we wrote numbers and shapes for them to identify.
One day we hid acorns of various sizes all around the room. We pretended we were squirrels searching for acorns. We brought them to the carpet and sorted them by size.
We played follow the leader while pretending to walk through various settings: snow, ice, mud, water, slush, deep snow, hills, etc.
Our letters of the week were: I, J ,K, L, M, & N. We identify the letter, the sound it makes, brainstorm other words that start with the letter, see who has the letter in their name and add their picture to our class alphabet book. We also practice writing the letter during planning or recall time.
We changed up our question of the day a few times over the past two weeks. Instead of doing a yes/no question, we did multiple choice questions ("What color is your hair?" and "What color are your eyes?"). This was a great way to encourage the kiddos to work together to figure out their answers.

We read and acted out the story “The Mitten”. Each child was a different character.

We made animal tracks in the “snow” using puffy paint & various animals.
We mixed colors together to create new colors using ice cubes and salt water or baking soda and vinegar.

They filled the ice cube trays with the colored water and we froze them. When we took them out, they used the colored ice cubes to create pictures.

We sorted and graphed animals that hibernate or migrate.
We worked on colors, numbers/counting, letter/sound recognition using magnets and cookie sheets.

We created our winter self portraits for our portfolios.
We used unifix cubes to spell out our names, see whose name is the longest, and measure.

For the past two weeks we have had a giant box in our dramatic play area. The kiddos have been using it as their "hibernation cave". They have been decorating it with cave drawings and even made a fish pond to put outside next to the cave. This inspired a lot of fun dramatic play!

In the art area they created “blankets” out of large pieces of paper, decorated them, and then had a “classroom sleepover” in the safe place.

They moved the "sleepover" to the carpet and decided to "roast marshmallows".

They have been building lots of roads, tracks, and ramps for the cars in the block area.

They have been doing a lot of writing in the writing area. Next month we will add a post office element to the writing area to encourage this further.
They have also been very into pretending to work in a hair salon, so we will be adding some elements for that to our dramatic play next month.

This week (and for the next four weeks) we will have a visitor named Miss Tina in our classroom every Wednesday. She is teaching us about nutrition and being active using a program called Color Me Healthy.