Overview |
This 3-day afternoon class for Pre-K students enhancing their learning habits as the day adds 3 more hours of experiences to their day. To help with Kindergarten readiness we have a group lunchtime, recess, read alouds with learning centers, small group activities or large group presentations to extend the learning with an emphasis on hands-on opportunities in all subject areas.
2019-2020 Theme: Around The World...... (below are some highlights)
April-May AUSTRALIA Learn virtually by checking out this site. More activities and stories to follow.
March . IRELAND Cut short due to COVID-19, we still began our fun on the Emerald Isle identifying Irish symbols like shamrocks and Celtic crosses. We listened to folktales of Finn McCool and drew our own Irish giants. St. Patrick’s Day had to be celebrated at home but continue learning fun country facts by checking out this site.
February. INDIA. We moved west to explore this monsoon country and experimented with that concept in a water table, wow! We also learned how colorful the native clothes are so we designed our own red saris. We talked about Hinduism and how it compares to Buddhism.
January. CHINA. As Hannah visited her cousins there we heard about Shanghai, saw pictures and added more information in The Day of the Dragon King. We were introduced to Buddha and made a giant mural of him. We learned to count and write 1-10 in Chinese and tried to build the Great Wall of China in our hallways!
December CANADA Flying north we trekked over our border the port city of Vancouver and the Yukon to find gold in this country. We learned about the Inkshuk and their rock people statutes and heard the national anthem often while we cut and colored maple leaves and made syrup smelling pictures!
November. PERU. This South American country boasts of the Rainbow mountain so we learned about it, saw videos of it and drew our own with pastels. We also explored every fact we could about llamas because we love that native animal. We also tried designing gourds, it’s hard but cool national art.
October. MEXICO. Going south of our USA border we brushed up on our Spanish, made mini-serapes, and heard the story of Adelita, Spanish Cinderella. We loved dancing around the Mexican Hat or stomping on la cucharachas!
September. USA Before we can travel we must learn where we live and explain the different levels of places such as town, state, region and country. Once we created our big American flag and setup our own passports we were ready to explore other countries. We generated a list of places we thought we’d like to go for real or imagine and began our monthly journeys......
2018-2019 Theme: Magic Treehouse Series
Dive into Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Treehouse series and go back in time to when dinosaurs roamed the Earth or medieval times with castles and knights. Other adventures go to geographic places like the arctic or the rainforest. Any adventure with Jack and Annie opens up a whole new level of learning through hands-on experiences that sneak in all those critical thinking, writing, math, art, and science skills as we hear the stories then jump into learning by “seeing” what Jack and Annie encounter with classroom experiments, center and games.
2017-2018 Theme: Cam Jansen Mysteries
Improve your memory skills and solve these mysteries with young Cam Jansen. Learn about Cam and his picture-taking memory and do the same while exploring the mystery topics such as diamonds, firefighters, pet care and more.
“The use of literature to teach curricular concepts helps relate the concept being taught to real-life situations, bringing the concept into the child’s world. (Whitin, 1992, p. xii)”