Wednesday Preschool - Dentist

We had a lot of fun in preschool today learning about the dentist.  We started with brushing the teeth of dolls and puppets.

We talked about what a dentist is and all the different tools that a dentist uses and some of the tools that we use at home.  In the picture below, kids are practicing their flossing skills.

We watched a fun little video about Elmo and what he'd do if he had teeth.  Be sure to check out the preschool lesson plans for details about dentist day, Preschool Dentist Pack.

Here is the chart me made about all things dentist.

We "brushed" our "teeth" white (egg cartons painted with white paint using a toothbrush instead of a paintbrush).

We also practiced dropping a toothbrush into a bottle.  I taught them that they had to hold the toothbrush at their nose and then let go of it to drop it into the bottle.  They decided that meant they could bend WAY over!  Funny kids!

I introduced "Hop Along the Path" for the first time today.  It's a hopping game that promotes counting and one-to-one correspondence as they hop from tooth to tooth.   They loved it!

As we read a couple of dentist books the kids helped brush the teeth of the dolls and puppets again.  We identified top and bottom teeth, and the inside and outside of teeth. We also talked about brushing tongues!

Preschool B was so exciting today!  I just want to say THANK YOU to all the parents that are reading with their kids every night.  It is very obvious which kids have been reading their reading books and which kids haven't.  It was a delight today to breeze through our reading lesson with the kids who were familiar with their books. We had a lot of fun diving into our encyclopedias and looking for ideas that we are interested in reading about.  I didn't introduce the new word families or sight words today.  Since we missed school Monday I decided to start fresh with new word families and sight words next Monday.

It was so much fun to browse through our books and mark everything that was interesting to us.  Actually, we couldn't mark everything because we ran out of post-its :)

Then we narrowed down all the ideas we marked to two that were the most interesting and marked them with additional purple post-its.  From those two we picked one and marked it with a yellow post-it for what they wanted to read about today. 

One of the great things about being a former teacher is that I have thousands of children's books.  I'm not kidding.  All of those cardboard boxes behind CF below are crammed with books.  We pulled out ones that match the concept that each child wanted to read about.

Next, we used highlighter tape to find all the words (or letters) that we knew in our books.

We pulled out our journals and everyone drew a picture of what they are studying about and then wrote about what they drew.

We discovered two ways to figure out how to write words that match our picture.  Watch the videos of the kids who discovered these great things!

 

I was so happy with how the first part of our class was going and how engaged everyone was that we didn't dive a whole lot into our math or free art today.  There was so much learning going on that there was certainly no reason to stop it. 

For snack we had some carrot fries (I love them the kids didn't).  We also made some cookies.  I generally stick with really healthy fruits and vegetables, but I've been thinking about making cookies for a while and today presented itself as the perfect opportunity to do so.

I'm pretty sure that everyone was delighted to have cookies for snack :)