Lakewood Avenue Children's School

Preschool Ages 1-5

Lakewood at Home

Lakewood for Middlers: April 17

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Happy Friday! It looks like it is going to be a beautiful day. We hope you and your child can spend some time outside today.

Sensory Invitation: Noisy or Quiet? Use a tin can, glass jar, plastic container or another container you can close. Find quiet and noisy items from around the house. Place them in the jar and determine if it’s loud or quiet.

Intent: This sensory invitation uses your child’s sense of hearing. Play around with different amounts of items in the jar to see how it sounds the same or different. How does a soft item sound different from a hard item?

Fine Motor Invitation: Tape extra paper towel/toilet paper tubes to the wall and drop pom-poms, cotton balls, small balls, etc. through the holes.

Intent: This activity incorporates fine motor development by using their hand muscles to guide each pom-pom to where they want it to go.

Art Invitation: Draw your backyard, include all of your favorite things to play with outside.

Intent: This allows the middlers to work more on using their fine motor skills to draw and paint. Have them draw from memory or look outside and draw what they see. Have them use colors that they see outside to create the drawing.

Outdoor/Nature/Gross Motor Invitation:Backyard Scavenger Hunt

Here are suggestions for things your child might look for/find.

  • 3 different leaves
  • 2 sticks as long as your foot
  • something that smells good
  • something growing that is green
  • something you think is beautiful
  • something that makes you laugh
  • something that feels soft

Intent: Get outside and enjoy the nice weather and beautiful spring scenery. To look closely at the world and engage all the child’s senses.

Lakewood for PreK: April 17

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Happy Friday! We hope your weekend offers a bit of respite even though it may be wet. Today’s weather looks beautiful and we hope you and your child can spend some time outside.

Language/Nature Invitation: Read Swirl by Swirl by Joyce Sidman with your child or listen to this video. Challenge your child to find spirals outside or in the house. Ask how they can make those spirals with available art materials you have.

Intention is to find ways to represent the natural world through observation.

Sensory Invitation: Mud and toy tracks. Paint muddy toys with water to clean.

Consider making your own mud with water, plastic bin and dirt from your yard. Consider asking your child how different toys move through the mud. Which toys can move easily? Which toys need your help?
For example could a car roll through the mud? A ball? Would it be easier
to move the toy through plain water? Why or why not?

Intention is to explore cause and effect relationships, understand viscosity, etc.

Art Invitation: Spiral Art

Find anything that you can spin, dip it in paint then spin it on paper. Paint by feeling a swirl

OR

Try to see colors in the swirls of a shell if you have one, Look in close to the swirl and see if it can be represented visually with any present art resources.

Intention is to choose to draw from feeling or from observation.

Outdoor Invitation: Build and Bowl

Build a tower with anything you have that can tumble down like plastic cups, small blocks, etc. Herein lies an opportunity to knock stuff over in the great wide open of outside.

Lakewood for Toddlers: April 16

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It’s Thursday! Yesterday was the average last frost date for Durham, NC. This is the time to plant many things in vegetable gardens, and it should be a lovely afternoon for messing around in the dirt.

Sensory/Fine Motor Invitation: Gardening

You can do this inside with some child-safe potting soil (some potting soils contain fertilizers which are not meant to be directly ingested by humans), or outside in the dirt. Plant seeds (seeds stay viable for several years), new plants, or transplant something. Toddlers can help digging holes, pushing seeds into the earth, and watering.

Working in the garden engages the natural scientist in young children while developing fine and large motor skills.

Art Invitation: Markers and paper

This classic invitation is especially engaging when you change the size of the paper, very tiny and very large paper each change children’s approach and experience with the materials.

Markers present an opportunity for creative expression, mark making, and fine motor development.

Music/Movement Invitation: “Ring Around the Roses”

Children love this classic movement song. At LACS, we like to sing two verses:

Ring around the rosie

pockets full of posies

ashes, ashes

we all fall down.

Cows are in the meadow,

eating buttercups.

Thunder! Lightening!

We all jump up!

Outdoor Invitation: Hula Hoops

You can sing and dance to the above song in the traditional way, holding hands and moving in a circle, or get out a hula hoop and hold on to that. What else can your toddler do with a hula hoop?

Lakewood for Middlers: April 16

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It’s Thursday! Looks like the weather will be slightly warmer today. We hope you can get outside for a little while.

Sensory Invitation: Feel and Find

Use a shoe box (or similar box), cut a hole in the box big enough for your child’s hand to fit inside. Place a soft, smooth, rough, or furry item inside and let your child feel and describe what they feel. Can they guess what’s inside?

Intent: This sensory invitation will use the child’s memory on what different items feel like. Have them pay attention to how each object feels. What specific parts of the item can they recognize to help determine what it is?

Fine Motor Invitation: Draw different shapes on paper and try to cut out the different shapes.

Intent: The middlers LOVE drawing and using scissors in the classroom. This activity incorporates fine motor development by using their hand muscles to move and balance each cup. This activity also includes cognitive development with shape recognition.

Art Invitation: Use the shapes that you cut out and glue to create a collage.

Intent: The middlers have been very interested in using scissors and collaging. This activity encourages creative exploration while incorporating fine motor development.

Outdoor/Nature/Gross Motor Invitation: Blow bubbles. Have your child practice blowing bubbles and then have them chase and pop the bubbles you blow. If you have run out of bubble solution, you can find two recipes in this post.

Intent: Get outside and enjoy the nice weather and beautiful spring scenery. We want to encourage the middlers to use all of their big body muscles to enhance gross motor development.