McKinley Learning Center
The preschool students at McKinley Learning Center are ready for another fun month of learning.

• The 3-year-old classroom’s theme for the month of February is dinosaurs. Using fun themes with colorful visuals and hands-on play activities allows the kids to learn about new topics while working on school readiness skills.

This month, the children will participate in sensory activities, like digging for “fossils” in a sandbox, painting with dinosaur footprints, and sorting dinosaur figures by size or color.

We read engaging dinosaur books and sing songs like “Dinosaur Stomp” that get everyone moving and having fun. Teachers lead simple dinosaur crafts where children work on following directions while enhancing fine motor skills by coloring, cutting, and gluing. As they learn with our dinosaur theme, the children are developing their language, social, and cognitive skills through play and social interaction in a hands-on environment. Preschool is so much fun!

• This month in the 4-year-old room, we are focusing on ocean animals, friends, feelings, and bugs. We work on our fine motor skills by creating art projects that deal with our themes. We continue to work on independently gluing, cutting, painting, coloring, and tracing. A big focus in the 4-year-old room lately has been working on our social-emotional skills. We have been working on playing together with peers, sharing, taking turns, and using our words to communicate things with teachers and peers.

Some of our favorite activities have included painting our hands for art projects, using dot markers, painting with paint sticks, and using letter stamps to make license plates! 

• The students in the 5-year-old classroom have a variety of weekly themes coming up during the month of February such as jungle/zoo, outer space, hearts (Valentine’s Day), and many more. With each theme the students get to participate in fun activities that involve letter, number, animal, and color recognition. The students also get hands-on and do a fun craft aligning with our theme to show their families at home. During the month of February, our main focus is going to be acts of kindness. Our bulletin board out front will have a blank tree trunk where the students will get to place a heart if they have shown kindness to their peers, teachers, or even materials. 

Submitted by Alyssa Aker, Marisa Krekelberg and Macy Sternhagen, Early Childhood teachers at McKinley Learning Center