News: Bellwood Elementary

Preschool News

by Lyne Rerucha

October 17, 2008

Nature’s beauty has been a focus of our preschool exploration this month as the children have been learning all about the incredible changes taking place outside our classroom window. In order to truly engage in and understand those changes, we took several nature walks. During these walks, we practiced our scientific observation skills. As all good scientists do, the preschoolers collected samples of their findings, spent time drawing their findings, and making hypothesis about what they had discovered. One of our most memorable discovering s was the enormous spider web we found attached to a large branch which had fallen from a tree. Upon close scientific observation we were amazed to see the web inhabited by tiny white baby spiders. The next day after it rained we returned to the web to find it broken and all the baby spiders were gone. This led us into a discussion of what had happened over night to cause such a change in our web.

Our preschool family project for October was a classroom nature collage. Each child was asked to go on a nature hunt with their family and find at least 5 items that we could use for our nature collage. They were asked to be very creative! The children used these items to practice their descriptive words. We came up with words such as: pokey, fuzzy, sticky, hard, round, rough, soft, mushy, and many more. Colin’s family brought in some deer sheds which of course fostered much excitement. The children helped Ms. Cathy and I place the items between large pieces of laminate which we hung from our ceiling in our science area to enjoy allergy free. Thanks to all the families for your support in our nature collage project!

Making such close observations of nature of course lends itself to exploring the concept of living and non living things. With the help of families the children collected many varieties of insects and even a couple frogs to add to our science table. We planted four house plants which also found a home in our science area. As the children learned more about what it meant to be alive, we added items that were not living such as rocks, dried leaves, silk plants, and plastic insects. Before this letter goes to press we will hopefully have some live fish to take care of as the year progresses. The preschoolers will experience how a seed germinates, spouts, and then grows as we take our seeds from our pumpkins and plant them. Be watching for our scientific drawings of this process.

October can not pass without mentioning fire safety. The preschoolers took our annual trip to the fire station and learned first hand how firemen help keep us safe and all the tools they have to do their job safely. I extended the safety theme to include stranger safety and outdoor safety. We learned more about stranger safety by watching an interactive video created by John Walsh titled The Safe Side: Stranger Safety. If anyone is interested in viewing the video with your child at home I would be willing to lone it out. This year I ordered a board game called PLAY IT SAFE! It is an awesome game that depicts dangerous situations both inside and outside your home and if the child can describe what is dangerous about the scenario they get to move forward on the board. Remember to discuss safety issues with your child often!