Dental Talk and More!
It was a short, but busy week! We had a special parent visitor who is a local pediatric dentist. She talked with the children about the importance of brushing and flossing. She played a game with the children about foods that are either healthy or not healthy for our teeth. She also read a few great books on going to the dentist and the tooth fairy! The children even got take turns using a jumbo toothbrush to brush the teeth of a puppet and a enlarged denture replica. The children were able to bring home a goodie bag with a new toothbrush in it.
In the classroom, the students did a lot of targeted fine motor work this week.
For one of the projects, the students made sculptures. The base of the sculpture was a piece of foam pool noodle. The children used their fine motor skills to poke a pipe cleaner into to noodle and thread pony beads onto it. Once the pipe cleaner had the ideal amount of beads, the children poked curved the pipe cleaner and poked the other side into the noodle. The children made great observations about the beads. They talked about how some were shiny, sparkly, and all the different colors.
In the sensory table, the children used their fine motor skills to pick up pom poms and drop them through cardboard tubes. The tubes were taped to the side of the bin. The children used various types of tongs or chop sticks to pick up the poms poms.
Under the loft, we have our “quick service restaurant” set up. The children used the phones to call in orders and then the “grill cook” makes the food on the grill and the “cashier” rings it up and gives it to the “customer.” The children enjoyed saying “order up” when the food was ready. The children are having a lot of fun with this dramatic play set up.
The easel had magnet puzzles on one side and open-ended painting with textured paint brushes on the other. The children worked hard to put the magnet puzzle pieces in the right spot to make it match the picture. The children also enjoyed exploring with the textured brushes and different colors of paint.
On the tables, there was kinetic sand with different shaped sand toys. The children have been enjoying making sand castles, so I put out some sea animal shaped molds for different shaped castles. Instead of using the toys as a cookie cutter. They used it as they would use a bucket to make a sand castle. First, they filled the mold with sand, packed it down, then flipped it over and lifted to reveal the shape. The other table has some peg stacking toys. The children discovered that the higher you stacked the toys the more the tower would lean and then eventually fall over. We tried to count and see how many could be stack up before it started to lean or fall over.
In music, Ms. Wada introduced a new instrument. It was drums! The children loved playing the drums. Ms. Wada taught us to hit the edge of the drum instead of the middle because it was different sounds. We all played together with little drums then took turns to play the big drum! Ms. Wada also taught the children how to count to four in Spanish. We counted 4 beats on the drum to go with the beat of the song.
