How much is that puppy in the window?

Happy Sunday! What a wonderful end to a week.
Our week has been a lot of fun as we learn more about pets!

We spent our circle times talking about our favorite pet animals. The children really love this topic.
I taught the children the lyrics to "how much is that doggy in the window" in which they would reply with a "bark bark!". It was so adorable. After the doggy, the children would put up their hands to offer me more pets to sing about, such as kitties, birds, snakes and fish.

Preschool songs are so fun to learn, and have so much learning in the singing. When children learn new songs, they are also learning timing, tempo, repetition, memorization and in this song prediction. We had to predict what the new pet would say, and see if we were right since I only taught them what a fish would say (either fishy lips or glug, glug). This is known to support long term learning for math and literacy. Not to mention creative expression.

We also practiced our preposition with a kitty and a transparent cup. The cup being see through helps the children literally see the kitty "in" the cup. Again, we practiced left and right, as well as on top, behind, under and in front as prepositions.

 

In our artistic expressions center, the children made their own pets this week! Pet rocks.

We had the freedom to choose which rock we wanted from a group of smooth rocks, before decorating them with paint, googly eyes, sequences and pompoms.

We also made our own fish tank! It was fun to use water colour paint to cover our paper plates, before adding aquarium rocks. We had to wait till the paint dried before adding our own fish.

 

Capilano Playschool children love sensory play! Mostly, we love our playdough. 

 

Some children are more sensitive to sensory and messes, or are just not in the mood for messy sensory. I set up these sensory bags this week, to offer a different exposure to sensory play. Most of the children knew one was water, one was paint and the third was "goo", or in more technical terms, hair gel with blue food colouring. I also put various amounts of foam fish in the sensory bags to compare numbers and promote addition. Generally, when I can successfully offer the children groupings in small quantities, when we count them I will ask them to count how many in total, in this incident, how many fish in total if we count all of the bags.

Our house center is still a pet store and adoption clinic in prep to go to the Edmonton Humane Society.

 

Alana, our Edmonton Public Library librarian paid us a visit this week. She read us great books, including Children make Terrible Pets (starring Lucille Beatrice Bear) by Peter Brown. We loved the comedy in this book! EPL is an AWESOME extension to our program.

Sincerely,

Ms Asha