First Week of Summer Camps: Insects!

Summer Camps have begun!!
We structure summer camps much like the regular school year to continue the consistency for those who have been in our preschool already and to introduce the structure to those who are coming for their first time.  We have centers each day where the children learn through playing with one another or individually, learning social skills and gaining self-confidence as they try new activities.

One great aspect of our summer camps is that they are for children ages 3-6.  This gives many of our older children opportunities to be examples to and teach the younger children, like how to play hopscotch, for instance.

 It’s also a terrific opportunity for siblings to get to be in the same class and to strengthen those sibling relationships.  I love how this brother and sister were role-playing and working together to make the food and eventually serving it to the other children.

The theme for our first camp was INSECTS!
This is always such a fascinating topic for preschoolers.  They love that they all have personal experiences with insects and we made sure to look for insects and other bugs while we were out at recess this week too.  We learned that insects have 6 legs, 2 antennae, and 3 body parts.  

For one of our projects, the children took turns choosing an animal out of the bag and then counted it’s legs to determine if it was an insect or another kind of animal.

After they counted the legs, they sorted the animals into 2 groups: insects or other animals.

Then we counted the two groups and compared them.  This was a great project to incorporate science and math as we counted and classified animals as well.

To the children’s surprise, our tiny little caterpillars arrived in the mail during one of our classes!  This was so exciting!  I love letting the children experience first hand the life cycle of butterflies.  It is so magical to be able to witness nature up close and personal.   

We also got to see some chrysalises from other butterflies so the children could look forward to when our caterpillars will change into chrysalises.

We acted out being different insects like flying around like butterflies and hopping like grasshoppers.  They all love getting up and using their bodies as they learn.

We also take time each class to let the children look through books about our theme independently.  I love how these girls are pointing out different things in the Insect Zoobook together!

The kids that come 3-days a week worked on the letter “C” and created their own caterpillars that they could take home! 

In addition to letter “C” we also learned “B” and “I”.
Our next summer camp will be “PETS”!  We love summer!