Winter Wonderland Preschool Day

This week we talked about seasons (focusing on winter) and reviewed the letters we have covered so far this year.  We started with our calendar as always.  We always sing the days of the week and the months of the year as we are talking about the calendar.  I don't expect them to remember them yet but hopefully they will stick in their little brains eventually.  We sang Once There Was A Snowman, Popcorn Popping On The Apricot Tree, a song about Fall leaves and one about Summer.  We read a few books on seasons.  We looked at pictures of a tree during all four seasons and talked about the differences.

 We did some prewriting activities like simple mazes and tracing activities to help them work on their fine motor skills.  They were all winter themed and downloaded from here and here.

We practiced spelling their names with a "snowball fight".  The letters were all mixed up and they had to unscramble the snowballs and glue them down on their papers.

 We did a lot of matching games with the letters we have already covered this year.  I pulled out a bunch of folders from my file folder collection.

 We did counting games with clothes pins on cards.  It was a good fine motor skill builder as well.  We are starting to work on our numbers 11-20.

 We have been learning about graphs.  The kids are still working on a weather tracking graph from last week.  We played a game with a paper dice showing pictures of winter clothing and they had to make a graph of their results.  It was fun to watch them working so hard.

We played some games and practiced copying patterns with little pictures of sledders, skiiers etc,  Then we practiced letter recognition by matching the letters on cards with letter tiles to spell out winter words.  They really enjoyed digging through the letter tiles and finding the matches and shouting out which letter they needed next.  I never know what activities they will go crazy over.

Last night, I made sparkly white salt dough and little snowman making kits for the kids.  I made one for Red Fish as well and they turned out darling.  I saw one of these kits online but the page doesn't exist anymore.  I used felt to make mittens (on toothpicks) and scarves.  I used foam to construct little top hats and carrot noses.  Then there were google eyes, buttons, beads and rocks for constructing faces etc.