As an Experience Early Learning Blog Ambassador, we receive the Experience Early Learning preschool curriculum in exchange for sharing our honest and authentic stories resulting from our personal experiences. As always, our opinions on amazing things for children are 100% our own. Keep in mind that all preschoolers do things in their own time and on their own terms. What one is ready for, another might not be. Please use your best judgement when planning activities for your children.
This week, we're learning all about the Rainforest Floor Layer with Experience Early Learning (formerly Mother Goose Time). So far, we've talked about jaguars, roots, and lily pads.
Today we're focusing on mushrooms with a fun Mushroom Math Preschool Activity.
We learned a few fun facts about mushroom from our Teacher Guide including the following:
Mushrooms are fungi that easily grow on the forest floor because they don't need sunlight. Some mushrooms are safe to eat, but others are poisonous. There are over a million different types of mushrooms. They grow in many different sizes and are found in dark, damp places.
The curriculum overlapped art with math for this lesson. The art activity was to make pretend mushrooms and then play a counting math game which meant the children practiced fine motor skills while exploring number sense.
There are so many wonderful Make & Play activities included in each month's Experience Early Learning preschool curriculum kit.
These activities give children the opportunity to create something which is then used for dramatic play, math exploration, or even a literacy activity.
In the last year, we've made a variety of puppets, math games, scientific tools, dramatic play props and so much more!
For today's activity, the preschoolers used playdough to stick a particular number of mushrooms upright on their Mushroom Math gameboards.
Not surprisingly, the kids really loved this activity. The best part was definitely using the art project to play the game. The kids thought it was really cool to play with their own work.
We also pitched it as learning the rules to a game that they can keep playing at home.
Since the preschoolers were going to be taking their Mushroom Math games home, we used dice in our classroom and kept the number squares attached to their gameboard. We definitely didn't want to lose any of the pieces.
We even had a family report back that they played together over the weekend!
Another great activity that was on the agenda for today was Picking Mushrooms. We encouraged the preschoolers to pretend that beads were mushrooms and stick them into playdough to form the letter D.
Not only was this a wonderful literacy-based activity, but it's also a great way to build fine motor skills and we all know how important that is for our preschool friends.
Don't forget to check back next week to see what we're up to as we continue to Explore the Rainforest with Experience Early Learning (formerly Mother Goose Time).
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