I had the opportunity to teach Cooper's Co-op preschool group. This week was all about letter F and I chose to focus in on Fish, Fires, and Forests. I came up with an idea to actually go purchase those 15 cent fish from walmart and let the kids feed them and touch and feel them. When I brought out the 7 fish they kids were so excited! They loved watching them and loved feeding them. They got a little more comfortable with them that they began trying to catch them. At first I gave them a paper cup to catch them in, but that was wayyyy to easy. So then I just let them go at it with their hands. I figured that if all 7 fish were still alive by the end of the preschool time, they could each take one home.
At one point, they were all helping one of the boys, Cameron, to get all 7 of them in his hands at one time. He had 5 of them, then 6, then all 7 of them cupped into his two hands squirming all around!! It was pretty funny. They sure got some "hands on" experience here! I doubted those poor fish had much longer to live...
Another fun activity we did was one I remember very well from my childhood. I will never forget it, and I hope that it might impact some of these kids as much as it had me. I found some whole tilapia fish, with eyes, bones, scales, fins, and all, at walmart. The kids got to paint the fish all different colors and then we pressed a piece of long paper over the fish to make a fish print. They are especially neat when the kids paint the eyes a separate color or the fins a separate color, the fish prints turn out so neat. You can even see the scales on the print. The kids loved this. You can see Cooper's concentration as he is painting this real live fish. Needless to say we washed our hands multiple times throughout these two short hours!
Another fun activity we did was fishing. The kids helped to put together a fishing pole and paperclips clipped onto paper fish. Then they each got to take a couple turns "fishing." They loved this too!
The next preschool day, we talked all about fires. It was fun to educate them a little bit on what to do if there is a fire and how to handle it. We talked about STOP DROP AND ROLL and even practiced doing it. Each child got to have a phone (old cell phones or play phones that were laying around the house - can you believe we have so many old cell phones! What are we supposed to do with all of them now that they are so outdated by apple! They turn into toy phones for purposes like this! =-)) I helped them find the numbers 9-1-1 and we practiced dialing the number on our phones. We then got to reenact a fire scenario. One child got to be the one to yell fire, one child got to be the one to call the fire department. These two also practiced stopping, dropping, and rolling. 1 child got to answer the phone call at the fire station, and 3 children got to be the firefighters to come put the fire out. This was the biggest hit with this group of 4 year olds! They wanted to do it again and again, and they wanted to switch roles and do it some more!! So this game lasted a while. It was a lot of fun. The kids then got to Fingerpaint a picture of Fire. (notice the play on the letter F). They mixed yellow paint and red paint to create orange fire.
We got out the kids treasured blocks as well as city pieces from their train set. We found all the fire trucks and emergency vehicles we could find throughout our house and the kids built a city together with a fire department and matchbox cars. This, they loved. This went on for quite a while too and I was impressed by their ability to work together as a team building this city.
The last activity was to go into a Forest for the letter F. We are lucky to have a forest in our backyard to use for this preschool. Of course that's why we moved here, so that we would have a forest to use when I had to teach the letter F at preschool! They each got a small bag to collect any nature items they thought were neat and I pointed out different things to see in the forest, like the different shapes of the leaves, the nuts and apple-like things that were falling off of certain trees, the sticks and branches, fallen trees and old logs, nests up high, and the different colored leaves.
Teaching 2 days of preschool in one week is a whole lot of preparation and work. But I really enjoy teaching and we always have a ton of fun! It is always a memorable experience. Cooper actually remembers very well things from the preschool I did when Jaxton was 2 and a half. That means Cooper was only 1 and a half and he still can recall some of the things we did at our house. Fun fun times! We actually ended up stopping this preschool in November since 2 of the little boys were moving away, and the little girl in the group was going to join a formal preschool to prepare her for kindergarten. That would leave 2 boys and so we decided to dissemble the group. It was a lot of fun while it lasted!!
No comments:
Post a Comment