At Trafalgar Oaks, we have created a kindergarten readiness program for our preschoolers who will be attending kindergarten in the fall. This program introduces literacy, counting, writing, and reading to name a few!

Today our preschoolers continued practicing 1-1 correspondence with numbers. They looked at different numbers and counted out the amount on their worksheet, marking each square with the correct number. This helped them strengthen their counting skills, and number recognition as well. Our preschoolers also worked hard to count the correct number of stickers carefully and match numbers to one item at a time.

We also began exploring shapes! We began our session with a fun shape game that encouraged our preschoolers to recognize and identify different shapes such as circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, ovals, hearts and stars. Next our preschoolers got to participate in a shape sorting activity, where they practiced grouping shapes by their attributes and practicing cutting with scissors and glueing. Together we practiced recognizing and identifying different shapes including circles, squares, rectangles, ovals and triangles and they had fun learning how to draw each shape while also building their fine motor skills skills and early writing skills.

This week’s activities has helped our preschoolers strengthen hand eye coordination, expose them to critical thinking, further develop early math skills, and sharpen their already growing observational skills.

Our classes have had so much fun exploring the science of weather! They learned in many different and creative ways!

First up is our weather-in-a-jar! The children made:

A cloud in a jar
Rain in a jar (we tried 2 different ways!)
A snowstorm in a jar

Making our cloud in a jar, we talked about how clouds form in the sky. When warm air rises, it cools and turns into tiny water droplets, just like the mist we saw forming inside our jar! Watching this happen helped connect what the children see in the sky to something they created themselves!

For the rain in a jar, we explored how clouds hold water. Using our materials to represent clouds, we saw how they can only hold so much. Once they become too full and heavy, the water begins to fall, just like rain!

Our snowstorm in a jar gave us a chance to talk about cold weather. The children learned that when water droplets in clouds get very cold, they freeze into tiny ice crystals. These crystals come together to form snowflakes, which then fall to the ground as snow, just like the snowy effect we created in our jars.

Here are some pictures of the fun (and messy) results!

Next up is our weather art!

We have 5 large art frames we are filling with the amazing art from our classrooms and the children created their own lightning storms. We explored using watercolours to design a variety of different backgrounds some were dark and stormy, while others had pops of colour to represent the sky during a storm.

Once the backgrounds were dry, we added bold lightning bolts on top, bringing the whole project together.

Through this art project the children were able to experiment with colour blending and different painting techniques. They also expressed their own individual creativity with their unique storm designs. This project also helped with fine motor skills through painting with brushes and adding artistic details. All this was done while learning about weather!

We think they turned out pretty amazing, here’s a peek at the process and finished products: