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It's February already! A new month brings a new theme with our Experience Preschool curriculum. This month we are 'traveling' around the world, from the safety of our classroom, with Global Passport. The first week is almost over and we have had fun exploring all of the new things on our shelves, playing in our kitchen cooking up fun foods, and learning all about different travel tools. We made suitcases and camera props, built airplanes, practiced our public speaking skills, and used shaving cream to make fun art. This week we have focused on the letter G and started our word wall for the month.
I love using shaving cream in class. There is so much you can do with shaving cream and the children love it. Not only does shaving cream make really pretty art, it creates a fun sensory opportunity as well. Today in Week 1, Lesson 4 of our Global Passport unit our topic was Maps and Globes. During circle time I asked them what we use maps for, and the answer was "Maps help us find the treasure!" We talked about why maps are helpful and took a look at our globe, finding where we are on it. Our creative art lesson was titled Swirl Globe. We used a paper plate, Popsicle sticks, shaving cream and liquid watercolors.
I love having trays for shaving cream projects, it makes the clean up process easier. We put shaving cream on our tray and then the liquid watercolors. Since we were making Earth we used blue and green. The children took their Popsicle sticks and swirled the water colors into the shaving cream. When they had it how they wanted it they laid their paper plate on top of the mixture, gently tapping it. Then we moved the paper plate to another tray and they scraped the shaving cream off with a ruler (this works great), and revealed their design! They all turned out different, and so pretty!
We learned about two methods of travel this week, airplanes and boats. We used our fine motor skills to craft airplanes out of Popsicle sticks.
For our Global Passport unit I set up our kitchen for our dramatic play center. The children were excited to have the kitchen return, with fun new foods and a tea set. We also have a lot of flags up around our room, which is fun as we learn about different countries this month!
And let's not forget that Valentine's Day is next week. We are preparing for our Valentine's Party! We made hearts using shaving cream and liquid watercolors (like I said, I love shaving cream in art), and the children had so much fun with this process that they decided to decorate their Valentine's bags this way too. Next week we will be adding some foam hearts to them before passing out our Valentine's.
In our Experience Preschool curriculum box this month this was one of the books we received. We always gather towards the end of class to end our day and we read a few pages from it today. The children are excited to read more of it! This one is interactive with questions to answer throughout, and we are learning about different things around the world as we read it. I love the books that we get each month.
We are excited to see what's in store for next week.
