Art Ideas for Letter recognition
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Pre-School Themes |
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See the Books every PreSchool Teacher MUST have!
LANGUAGE ACTIVITIES
Display baby photos and present photos. Discuss changes.
Make ‘A Book about Me'. Read to the class.
Copy / trace own name.
Make Name with pasta
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Learning Centers in Pre-School
Learning centers are areas within a classroom with a collection of activities and materials. These materials are related by subject, purpose, or projected skills. These activities and materials are used independently by the children, or with teacher direction, to reinforce and/ or enrich one or more skills or concepts. Learning centers are an excellent way to individualize the curriculum to meet the varying needs of young children.
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To encourage discovery and exploration: children learn by doing
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To provide multiple techniques and methods to meet different learning styles
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To allow for teaching in small groups or individuals
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To provide positive reinforcement
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To develop a sense of responsibility in the children
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To structure children´s interaction: they are encouraged to verbalize and develop social relationships, including sharing
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To allow children to make decisions: the children choose an activity that meets their personal needs and goals
Importance of Learning Centers:
Manipulatives Center
This center provides children with the opportunity to explore different materials that help them develop and practice their fine-motor and perceptual-motor skills, such as: grasping, releasing, pushing, pulling, assembling, and disassembling. Additional objectives of this center include: reinforcing computational and problem-solving skillas well as patterning, sequencing, size, and measurement. When categorizing and sorting materials found at this center, children are also exercising their mathematical and logical thinking.
Block Center
The Block Center provides children with materials for designing and building, organizing projects, and implementing them. Children learn about shapes, sizes, and distances. They develop eye-hand coordination as well as logical/mathematical thinking. They also practice classification, measurement, fractions, order, balance, symmetry, stability, and cause and effect. In their creative and imaginative designs they find similarities with the real world. By interacting and cooperating with other children they are able to develop their social skills.
Art Center
This center provides the children with opportunities to creatively and imaginatively discover line, color, shape, and texture by seeing and feeling objects. The variety of materials enables them to have sensory experiences such as expressing their own thoughts and ideas through picture making, puppetry, modeling, constructing, etc.
Dramatic Play Center
This is a center of social interaction, where children interpret roles of their everday lives; usually imitating the adults around them. At the beginning of the year, this center is transformed into a house, for this is what children know best since it is the environment from which they come. Throughout the school year this center changes into different settings depending on the unit of study, therefore allowing children to take on different roles. Main objectives include: developing social skills such as communication, negotiation, problem solving, as well as improving children´s representational skills, where they show what they know, and most of all their interest and likes.
Reading Center
This center is designed to be a comfortable space where children relax, enjoy, and explore books. It surrounds their reading experience in a calming and enjoyable mood. The Reading Center provides children with opportunities to hold and read books, to participate in non-verbal communication, interpret pictures and text, and to talk about what each of them discover. Through meaningful experiences at this center, children will come to feel motivated about a ¨true¨reading experience.
Writing Center
The writing center is an excellent place to communicate ideas and messages through letters, words and graphics. Children enjoy copying letters, and using the letters they know, to try out new words,which is called invented spelling. They can also express themselves through drawings, which they can compile into a book of their own. Therefore, kids explore their ideas naturally, creatively, and in a way that enables them to make decisions that enrich their first writing experience.
Water and/or Sand
The materials available in these centers, such as funnels, strainers, etc., provide children with the opportunities to develop their fine motor skills. While apparently performing simple experiments, children are actually solving problems and developing logical thinking.