Before we dive into what we have done with our curriculum so far this week, I thought I'd share the fun that we had with candy canes! We conducted a candy cane experiment and then worked on our fine motor skills by making candy cane ornaments. For our experiment we coated candy canes in baking soda (lightly coat the candy canes in water first so the baking soda sticks, but not too much that the color bleeds). I gave each child an eyedropper and cups of vinegar, and we talked about what we thought might happen when vinegar mixed with baking soda. This was a fun, colorful, fizzy experiment! We also got to see the candy canes begin to dissolve. They loved the reaction when they mixed the vinegar with baking soda, and we spent a lot of time conducting this experiment. Hands-on learning is the best! I love giving my students opportunities to conduct experiments themselves. After our experiment we worked on our fine motor skills by making candy cane ornaments for their Christmas trees. I love this time of year!
Now let's dive into what we have been up to with Experience Curriculum this week.
Have you ever written down a story that your child or student tells you? If you haven't, I recommend it. You never know what direction their story will go and having them to look back on is special! Children love sharing their ideas and thoughts. Storytelling promotes brain development and imagination - and their imagination at this young age is great. It also teaches your preschooler about language and helps them get ready to become writers and readers!
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This week in preschool we are focusing on tundra animals. We are learning how animals adapt to the cold, who cares for the babies, and how we can help endangered species. So far this week we have learned about penguins and polar bears. During our penguin topic, in Week Three, Lesson 11 of Ice Castle with Experience Curriculum, we made penguin puppets and then they created a story about their penguin. They gave their penguin a name and as they told me their story I wrote it down on the penguin dictation sheet. Some stories were longer than others, and each one was unique! I loved that they were so creative!
I saved these stories and penguins to add to their portfolios so their parents would have them to look back on, they are pretty fun! I loved having the penguin dictation sheet to use that Experience Curriculum sent with this activity. Our math activity that we did this day was called Iceberg Building. We pretended that our connecting cubes were icebergs and used them to help us solve some addition problems. We learned what addition was, and what the addition and equal symbols looked like. We rolled our die twice to get two numbers, each time counting the dots and then matching the number of dots on the die to the number on the card. We laid out the two numbers into an addition problem and we used our icebergs to help us solve it. This was a fun way to learn and solve some simple addition problems. The children got to be hands-on with math - which again, hands-on learning is the best (and helpful when it comes to learning math)! We practiced number sense, fine motor skills, and 1:1 correspondence.
My preschoolers love this Ice Castle unit with Experience Curriculum. We are excited to learn about more tundra animals this week!
