Plants - A Tot School Experience

We love spring time at Little Adventures Preschool.  It means planting, and new life, and warm days!  Today our theme was all about plants.  It's such a fun theme to learn all about the parts of a plant and the life cycle of a plant.  Find our Plants Tot Pack Here!  We had a great amount of fun today playing with puzzles.  Through the year we've mostly pulled out the single piece chunky puzzles in tot school and it was fun to see which kids were ready for 12 piece puzzles.  We'll pull out the larger puzzles more often now!

 The kids LOVED the art project we did to show all the parts of the plant.  We started with our white sheet of paper and talked about where the dirt should go.  Then we went through the growth of a plant sequentially.  First we put a seed in the dirt (hot glue works well).  Next, the seed grows roots (string tied in a knot and separated, also hot glued on).  Then it grows a stem, followed by leaves and a flower.  There are also labels in the printable pack but we didn't get to that point yet.  We'll repeat the same activity tomorrow in preschool - look for an image with the labels then.

As the kids that come over are getting older we're prepping them for access to the whole garden.  In a few weeks the fence that has been keeping everyone out will be taken down.  We're utilizing all our springtime themes to take tours of the garden and talk about the plants and how to help the plants to grow (no touching or picking flowers).  We've also been talking a lot about garden beds and how our feet stay in the walkways.  It's working so far.  For the most part when they're turned free to play they all just end up in the sandbox anyway :).  What a lovely day to get out and play with plants!

Spring Book Giveaways!

Isn't it lovely that spring is in the air?  What a wonderful time of year.  We turn much of our attention to nature based themes this time of year in preschool. This past week we had so much fun learning all about fruits and vegetables.  It was so much fun to talk about the parts of plants that we commonly eat.  This book, "Tops and Bottoms" is a great story about a Hare who demonstrates that hard work pays off.  He tricks the lazy bear into letting him have certain parts of the crops and after doing all the work he gains the reward - food for his family.  Our preschoolers love this book every year.  It makes them giggle as we talk about the parts of the crops that each animal gets to keep.  As my springtime gift you I'm picking one lucky winner to have this book (or End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad, posted below) for your very own collection!  Keep reading for details.

"As usual, Stevens' animal characters, bold and colorful, are delightful. . . . It's all wonderful fun, and the book opens, fittingly, from top to bottom instead of from side to side, making it perfect for story-time sharing."-- Booklist

It is my absolute pleasure to introduce to you a new kind of book.  It's the first in a series of recipe-adventure stories created to teach and entertain young children. "Ideal for early child development, End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad uses the art of cooking, colorful illustrations and critical thinking lessons to make learning both educational and fun for kids. From counting and colors to food exploration and fun problem solving, this Kitchen Club Kids’ book gives parents a reason to start cooking and helping to establish healthy eating habits. As an added bonus, each story features a rhymey-good-timey recipe that can be prepared in the kitchen by cooks of any caliber."

We had so much fun with this book in our preschool class. It paired perfectly with our conversation about fruit and our math theme of representing quantities and numbers with numerals.  We were able to talk about our favorite fruits, name the colors of the fruits and practice naming numerals and counting to ten.

After we read the book we continued our fruit conversation to the snack table where we prepared a fruit salad.  We didn't have the exact ingredients (and we forgot the kiwis) but the kids had a blast pouring all the fruits into the bowl, mixing them up and enjoying their snack. I am very pleased with the resulting positive conversations about certain fruits that were previously not appealing.  I'm so glad that the authors created a book to encourage healthy eating in this day and age of processed food.  Fine work Bread+Butter Publishing!  In addition to the previous book, I also have an "End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad book to give away to one lucky winner.  Check out the details below and enter to win it for your own library!

Follow the Rafflecopter instructions below for your chance to win one of these fantastic books.  There will be two winners.  The first will get their book pick and the second will get the one left over (hopefully their book pick too!).  Books will be mailed out on Monday April 21st (upon receipt via email of the winner's mailing address).  Join us for the fun and complete your entries between now and the 21st!  Good Luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Preschool Fruit Theme

What a fantastic day of school!  We've been learning so much lately in school.  Our theme today was "Fruit" (makes sense with the theme "Vegetables" on Tuesday).  We started with puzzles, a repeated activity we'll do for the rest of the year.  We read a few books about fruit including "End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad" a fantastic book that you'll find a post about (and a giveaway!) later today. We continued with our guided reading lesson working on level A pre-reader texts.  Wonder why we're working on these texts since we've been using decodable texts all year?  Check out V is for Vegetable for more clarity. 

Another super fun aspect of our day today was that on our property we have about 10 different fruit trees and plants.  We were able to go on a nature walk just in our little area and talk about each of the different plants.  We searched for flowers that were starting to pop out and talked about if we don't bother them the bees will pollinate the flowers and fruits will grow.  We talked about the different shapes and colors of the different leaves and flowers. 

After returning inside we talked about numeral 4.  There is a great little series of books I read from Scholastic called "Number Stories".  There is a number chant at the end of each book and the kids love it!  They get to clap and stomp and jump and turn all for the number of the day.  It's so much fun.  Check out our full lesson plans for the Preschool Fruit Theme here.