Forest Animals

We moved from the desert to the forest as we spent the week learning about animals like deer, bears, raccoons, skunks, and foxes.  The children were more familiar with these animals since we live close to the mountains and many enjoy the forest with their families. 

The Pre-K classes were fortunate to get to meet a live forest animal this week!  Now domesticated, wild ferrets lived in the forests and are related to other forest animals like the skunk.  Thanks to the mom of one of our students for bringing Arthur to our preschool to let us pet him and learn more about this interesting animal!  The kids asked some very thoughtful questions so they could learn more, I was impressed.

Forest animal graphing!  This was a fun educational game the kids really enjoyed playing.  They took turns spinning the forest animal spinner and used a graph to show the results of how many times we spun each animal.  With this game we worked on math with counting, science with animal recognition, and social skills with taking turns. 

 

Another project we did this week was making our little “Forest Animals” book.  The kids cut out the pages and chose which order to put their book in.  We talked about the title of the book being on the front just like other books.  This was a great activity for beginning readers as well as those not ready to read yet as the words on the pages were very predictable and easy to follow so they could feel like they were “reading.”  This is actually an important step in learning how to read.

Each week, we change the books we have in our book basket according to our weekly theme.  This week, we had books and Zoobooks on forest animals.  I love these pictures of how interested the children are by these books full of animals!

Using fine motor skills as well as social skills as they build with Legos during centers.

Imaginative play, like these boys are engaging in, is very important as they figure out how to work together and which roles each child fills in our classroom. 

Thanks to a donation from one of our preschool parents, we got a new tree for our preschool!  The kids were quite mesmerized by this new toy they could discover on their own or with a friend at centers.  It’s always exciting to have something new to play with!