Food Pyramid

It was our week of nutrition and health and I wanted to do a fun activity to help the children understand which foods went into which categories of the food pyramid. This was a great activity and they loved it. We started at the bottom with the carbohydrates/starches and I had the children taking turns pulling 1 food item from the pile and putting it in the section and then we went on to the next student and then the next until the section was done and then we moved onto the next section. Depending on the group of children I was working with, sometimes there were 2 students selecting a food item at a time. The only real con I had is that our food pyramid was a little unbalanced due to the supply of plastic foods our school had on had.  :)

They loved this unit and at meal times the kids were always telling us which section their food items would go into and what other foods went into which sections and which foods were good for you and which weren't.

Handprint Valentine

The children really enjoyed making these little poems for their father's for Valentine's Day! I found the poem online and I really liked it, I did edit the last line (it read something like, "when I was so little") to say the age that they were (so 3, 4, or 5). I pulled each kid individually to do their hand because it would be much simpler that way than trying to do it in a full class setting. I used a foam heart shaped sticker and placed it on their hand and then I painted their hand with their choice of colour (I had 3-4 colour options). After they had dried I pasted them to pink construction paper (in retrospect, I probably could have pasted to construction paper first and it may have helped with the warping of the paper as the paint dried...but I don't know for sure). The kids just loved giving the project to their fathers and the parents thought the poem was quite cute as well. Another cheap, fun, and sentimental gift!

Measuring Up

 Yay, measuring charts! The hardest part isn't making them...it's remembering to keep up with their measurements because they grow so fast!!
I took different coloured sheets of construction paper and made 1 inch and 1/2 inch marks with a black sharpie to make it look like one very long multi-coloured ruler. I finished it all off by covering it contact paper (if you continue to follow my blog, you will find that I am a BIG fan of contact paper!)

I just used yarn and little "speech bubbles" (which I wrote their name on and also covered in contact paper) and I adhered it to their height with a little bit of scotch tape! I then used a dry erase marker to write their height on their name!

Owl Always Love You

It was February and I needed a cute wall display that the kids could help me create. I hopped on the internet to browse for ideas and this is what I came up with. The idea was to put up letters that read "Owl Always Love You" but I never got around to that because, seriously, who has time to write and cut out all those letters?

Anywho (no pun intended) the kids loved making their owls. I printed and cut out several different types of eyes, all the hearts for the faces, beaks, and the owls themselves; then the children picked out what they wanted and glued them to the bodies. It was simple and yet adorable for everyone!!

Rocket Ship

We did a space unit for a couple weeks and I wanted to create some sort of visual that help stimulate creative thought, so I hit the internet; taking different ideas from Pinterest I decided to create our own rocket. I took white butcher paper and painted it red, blue, and yellow for the different elements and then I sized them to the entry-way and taped it to the wall. When I first did it I had not added the flames or "USA" and lots of people thought it was a house (I couldn't have that) so I added flames using orange construction paper and "USA" with red construction paper and it was instantly more recognized as a rocket. The kids loved it! They used it during play time and we also did little skits within our class groups to present for everyone else and they loved that too! They really loved it and it helped me feel artsy fartsy.   :)

Meal Manners

I don't know about you, but we seem to have quite a bit of troubles (sometimes) controlling and promoting proper table manners. So I compiled a short list of basic manners that should be observed by even the youngest of my students. While this poster didn't magically fix all our problems, it did help provide the visual that many of our students need. Often times we till take a few minutes during meals to review the poster just as a simple reminder. It took some work to find all the images online, print them, colour them, paste them above the letters that I tried to so neatly write, and then I used contact paper over the whole thing to help ensure longevity. 

Anti-Tattling

Working in an all day preschool with sixteen 3-5 year olds can be tough, especially when it comes to the topic of tattling on friends, in our efforts to fight this behaviour we tried to encourage our children to tell us when they saw their friends doing especially good things. I believe it was a great idea, however, it didn't work as well as we had hoped it would. The children would often say things along the lines of, "Suzie and I played together and she's my best friend" etc., which is great and all, but we were trying to encourage things like, "I saw Jonny share his toy with Luke because he didn't bring one to school today" etc. We even tried giving the children examples and recording the things that we saw through-out the day, but it never really caught on and we moved on to different means of encouraging positive behaviour and not tattling.