This month, our preschool children enjoyed a variety of engaging outdoor and indoor activities that encouraged exploration, creativity, and early learning. During outdoor play, the children had the opportunity to try snowshoes, taking turns strapping them on and exploring the snowy playground in a new way. They noticed the bear shaped footprints and marks they made in the snow and carefully adjusted their movements as they experienced how the snowshoes felt different from their boots.
Another exciting outdoor discovery was two large ice cubes found on the playground. The children eagerly explored them by touching, observing, and sharing ideas. To extend the experience, water paint was introduced, allowing the children to paint directly on the ice and notice how the colours moved differently than on paper. Later in the day, the children observed that the ice cubes had changed in size, leading to thoughtful discussions about the sun, warmer air, and time passing. Working together with shovels, they enthusiastically smashed the ice, building teamwork while exploring early science concepts.
Indoors, the children focused on developing numeracy and fine motor skills through hands-on activities. Using large and small playing cards, they matched numbers and practiced identifying them, often using their fingers to count. To extend this into a winter inspired activity, a mitten-themed activity invited the children to match dots to numbers using tweezers and festive erasers, strengthening fine motor skills, number recognition, counting, and pre-writing abilities.
Overall, these activities provided meaningful, play-based learning opportunities that supported development across science, math, physical play, creativity, and social interaction.
