Preschool - Bones

This morning was my turn to teach our preschool. I have to say that this was one of the best mornings we have had with our preschool. I am sure a huge part of that was due to the fact that little JA decided to join in as much as he could and was just so pleasant and happy. One of the big struggles with teaching school has been dealing with trying to keep my little Buddy entertained/ out of the way when it is my turn to teach. Today was great!
This month we are focusing on the theme of "Our Bodies" and our weekly sub themes are "muscles, bones, five senses and healthy bodies". My lesson today was on bones. I have to admit that I was a bit daunted with this topic as I looked at various craft ideas online. The skeleton and bone crafts were just so complex that I knew it wouldn't go well so I decided to take a slightly different angle and use a few aids to teach about bones and skeletons and then explore how we can keep our bones healthy and strong.
We started out with our routine of circle time for our welcome song, calendar and weather. I labelled the girls circles with their last name on a bone. It was fun watching them try to figure out which spot was theirs since they aren't as familiar with their last names!


We then headed to the table where they found the chair that had their first name on an identical bone shaped label. We did our routine name tracing with dry erase markers. I have seen some real improvement with this since we started.

I then introduced our bone topic with a word strip (I always talk about the letter the word starts with and the sound it makes) and a discussion about our bones. I found a great poster at the dollar store that worked perfectly for this.

We watched a couple short video clips from sesamestreet.org on bones (I love this site for educational clips for toddlers).
As I mentioned all of the skeleton crafts seemed a bit too complex but I came across these great foam puzzles at the Dollar Store a few months back and thought they would be perfect. They were great but pretty tricky to put back together!


We then switched our focus and started to look at what we can do to have healthy bones (ie. eat dairy products). We discussed where dairy products come from and then I had a large basket full of dairy products that we looked through.
I found the next activity we did at this site here. I told them the "Five Dairy Cows" story with the finger puppets. I then gave them each a set of finger puppets to color and we then did the story again together with our puppets. They loved it.

We then took a break for a snack of bone shaped sugar cookies and blueberries.

After snack time I always set out a basket full of books on the floor for the girls to look through as the others finish up their snacks.
We finished off our day by going "grocery shopping". I gave the girls 5 gold chocolate loonies from the treasure box and a shopping basket. (This was a great way to practice counting money).

They then took turns pulling various grocery store items out of a large shopping bag. The purpose of our "shopping trip" was to buy dairy foods that would make our bones strong. As they pulled items out of the bag we would decide if they were dairy products or not. The dairy products went into their baskets to buy (cheese strings, yogurt and milk). They filled their baskets and "paid" with their coins. They LOVED this!

We finished off by singing "I'm all Made of Hinges" and plenty of free playtime.