Welcome Aboard the Preschool Express!

Happy New School Year!

Gosh, it's already the 2015-2016 school year, and I haven't even blogged about all the fun things we did last year!  I guess it's time to catch up!  

Last school year, our theme for the year was "Welcome Aboard the Preschool Express". We used the theme for the entire year.  At the beginning of the school year, I made a train engine and five train cars.  Our class can have up to 20 children in it, so the plan was to display the work of four students per train car.  As the year evolved, our ideas did too, so we started changing out the train cars depending on our current unit.  I will show how we changed out the train in other posts.  These are the train cars as I was in the process of making them: 

The train cars were made using bulletin board/butcher paper, glitter, glue, tape and laminated bordered papers for windows.  We used the same materials for the engine.  This is our train engine while it was being made:

Inside our dramatic play center, on the side of our loft, our student teacher created a train depot.  We changed it out as well during the school year.  

Our student teacher also took an idea I found on Pinterest to make this "where we are" board.  She cut out the pieces using her Cricut machine.  Where ever we were, the train car would be parked at the train station.  The board hung outside our classroom door so anyone who came to see us would know where to find us.  

A picture of our train engine after we hung it in the hallway for our beginning of the year display:

We used the train theme in other ways as well.  Every morning when the children come into the classroom, they have to find their name and put it in a basket.  For this theme, we labeled the basket "Passenger Check In".  They used "Tickets" from Trend Enterprises Their first day of preschool pictures were taken in front of the train engine and in front of our train depot.  They had passports to hold because they were all about to start their journeys on the Preschool Express.  

I will post again soon showing how we continued to carry our train theme through the whole year in case someone would like to do a train theme too.  

~Christa~

Paint Your Way Through Pre-K

  It's summer time and school is out.  It's time to plan for the upcoming school year, and I am excited to see the theme come to life.  I am hoping it will be lots of fun, but I will hold off on writing about it until school starts in August.

  Until then, I thought I would flashback to my favorites from last year for the next few weeks.  We had a wonderful time bringing a new curriculum to life.  Our school system adopted the Pearson O.W.L (Opening the World of Learning) Preschool curriculum.  We were not familiar with the curriculum, so we just adapted as we went along.  We taught the units of the curriculum, but also interjected holidays and other subjects within it.  

  The classroom theme for the year was "Paint Your Way Through Pre-K".  To start out the year, I made a big banner for the hallway outside of the classroom.  I painted the words on it, turning each "o", "g" and "a" into a paint palette and the sticks of the letters into paintbrushes.  I also splatter painted all over the banner to add color. The sock monkeys were added for cuteness.

  Throughout the year, the children had several different experiences with painting.  They painted with many different painting tools, as well as many different paints.  We used tempera paint, fingerpaint, watercolors, paint dotters and tempera blocks. We tried out metallic, glitter, textured and pearlized paints.  Their first paintings were marble paintings.  They had fun rolling the marbles around on their paper through the paint.  They also painted with textured rollers and bright colors at the beginning of the school year.  

  I did several foot print and hand print paintings with the children as keepsakes for their portfolios.  The children painted regularly at the easel in the Art Center.

  

   Painting our way through Pre-K was just the start of our creative adventure last year.  I look forward to sharing more of what was created!

~Christa~