Blog for French Valley K-Prep Preschool, LLC: Zz is for Zebra

This week, we talked about zebras, zoo animals, and the letter Zz.

Last week, we reexplored patterns and this week we continued talking about them, because zebras have a black and white pattern.

I gave the children a coloring page with a zebra in the shape of a Z. I put a "B" in each section that needed to be colored black. This was a difficult task for many. I don't do a lot of coloring pages and I don't emphasize staying in the lines, because research shows that children at this age are not developmentally ready for that kind of task. It has something to do with the development of their eyes and their fine motor skills. I wanted to see if the research is wrong (I know - I'm a rebel) and as I closely watched them, I could see what the studies talked about. Plus, coloring pages are not what I call "art"; it's more like play. That page (without the letter B's written in it was found here.

For our center, we went back to the lacing animals and this time, we tried a different stitch - "over, around, over, around..." This stitch was a lot easier for the children to manage than last week's stitch - "under, over, under, over...".

Our "real" art project was to make a picnic placemat. I found that idea from The Mailbox, which is a teacher site that sends me ideas every day. I cut slits in a white piece of paper and cut out red strips of paper. The children had to weave the red strips of paper through the white paper loom in a pattern and then flip the pattern: "under, over, under, over..." and the next strip - "over, under, over under...". My pre-ker's were very capable of doing this task. My preschoolers struggled with this, so I helped a lot.

We had beautiful weather this week. Here are some pictures of the children playing together:

There were all examining my big red roses (on their own). The buckets had something to do with what they were pretending. I think they were collecting pixi dust.