Dental Health Unit- Week 2

Hi Mom!
Toothbrushes and toothpaste, floss, mouthwash and healthy, happy teeth! What fun we've had completing our Dental Health Month Unit.
 We had a field trip to tour a local dentist's office- Canyon Lakes Dental. Can you believe that even being such a shutterbug like she is, Ms. Marianne didn't take even one picture of us on our field trip?!? She didn't even realize it, she was having so much fun at the dentist's office!
There was a very nice lady there named Ms. Debbie who showed us all of the rooms in the office- from the front reception area, to the kids room- where you get to watch movies while you're sitting in the special chairs and they're cleaning or working on your teeth!- the adult patient rooms, the cleaning area where they clean and sanitize everything they use during treatment, and even the surgery room where they put people to sleep to do work on their mouths.
Ms. Debbie showed us some really nasty pictures of mouths that have not been taken care of. The book was created by a dentist and called The Truly Disgusting Mouth Book. We didn't really like the pictures of blackened, yucky and plaque covered teeth, but we were totally fascinated at the same time! Even the moms who came with us and Ms. Marianne learned a few things looking at Ms. Debbie's book. But the pictures sure were awful! We all commented things to the effect of "That's why we brush our teeth!" Yes kids, yes it is! :)
We also had lots of fun moving each other up and down in the dentist patient chairs. There's a big button on the floor that moves the chairs and another one that lets out a big "whoosh!" when you push on it. Ms. Debbie told us that that button makes the "Tooth Whistle" (the tooth polisher they use to clean teeth), the "Tooth Tickler" (the drill) and "Mr. Bumpy" (the tooth grinder for cleaning out cavities) work by pushing air through them. We liked pushing on that one and listening to the sound! She also showed us some of the hand tools the dentist and hygienists use when working on teeth. We recognized them from the ones we'd practiced using in our preschool! Hurray for connections!
At the end of our tour, Ms. Debbie took us to the Treasure Chest they have in the office for small children and we got to choose a treasure for being such great listeners. There were some awesome treasures for us to choose from! We all had a great time on our field trip.

Many other activities we did this week used teeth and dental themed ideas. We practiced sorting cards with floss, toothbrushes, toothpaste and mouthwash on them. Then we took the cards and followed pattern strips that Ms. Marianne gave us to practice making patterns.
 We cut out and sorted teeth by size, gluing them onto a sheet in the correct columns. This also gave us some new vocabulary words- small, medium and large. We are used to saying little and big, but there are more words to use to describe the sizes we saw! Our cutting skills are really improving too. We're still working on gluing without using so much excess, but, hey!, at least it's washable! :)


 A really fun art / fine motor skill / science project we did this week was creating mouths out of play dough and white Tic-Tacs. We had to roll two "gums" out of play dough, bend them to look mouth shaped and then push the Tic-Tacs into the play dough to look like teeth! We loved comparing these to the false teeth Ms. Debbie showed us at the dentist office on our field trip. Some of us even pretended to make the teeth talk. hahaha!

We read Silverlicious by Victoria Kann. It's all about a girl who loses her sweet tooth and becomes grumpy when she can't taste anything sweet! When she finally chooses to be sweet again herself, she can taste sweet things again.  You can listen to it being read here . We also read a Dr. Seuss book called The Tooth Book that talked all about where to find teeth, what some types of animal teeth looked like and what teeth come in handy for. After we read the book, we created our own pages for the book that said what teeth come in handy for, and included a silly version of our name, in true Dr. Seuss fashion. For example, one of them read "Teeth come in handy for eating cheese, crackers and chocolate candy, said N. P. Fine-and-Dandy!" another read "Teeth come in handy for talking to Mom, Dad and Grandma Birdie, said A.P. Likes-to-Get-Dirty". We had a silly time coming up with words to make our names that would rhyme with our sentences. Dr. Seuss's birthday is March 2 and he is celebrated in schools all over the country on March 3 for "Read Across America Day" every year. We will celebrate him and his unique and fun style of writing all next week with a Dr. Seuss themed preschool week!

Finally, we had some pretend play mixed with science mixed with practicing our teeth brushing skills while we did an activity called "The Toothpaste Factory" that Ms. Marianne found from another preschool teacher. We each chose a flavor that we wished we could have in our toothpaste. We had flavors like Raspberry Plum, Mixed Berry ("I want ALL the berries in mine!") and Strawberry Mint. How creative are we?!? Then we chose a color that would make sense with our flavor and proceeded to create our toothpaste by mixing paint and shaving cream to form a paste. We then moved to the "Toothpaste Testing Facility" in which we practiced brushing the toothpaste on to over-sized teeth to see if it worked well. :) We switched samples so that we could try all three flavors on each of our teeth. While we worked, we sang the new song that we learned this week: "This is the Way we Brush Our Teeth" (sung to the tune of "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush"). It goes like this:

 

This is the way we brush our teeth, brush our teeth, brush our teeth.

This is the way we brush our teeth, so early in the morning.

We brush them up, we brush them down and brush in circles, all around.

But do not brush from side to side, or Sugar Bugs will surely hide!

 

 

Needless to say, we enjoyed squirting the paint and shaving cream, getting our hands dirty and testing our new flavors of toothpaste at the factory! Plus, our brushing skills are getting better and better!

This week concluded our Dental Health Unit, and Dental Health Month, but some of us proved ourselves to be Terrific Teeth Brushers, and we received a certificate announcing this, along with a fun suction cup toothbrush and kid toothpaste tube to celebrate our brushing our teeth morning and night for a full week. Some of us got close to the full week, and we're still working on remembering to keep our teeth clean each day. We've learned the importance of doing so now!

Next week will be all about Dr. Seuss. We'll be reading some of his famous books, playing some fun games themed around his works and enjoying a Seuss-tastic week in preschool!

 

 

Love,
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne

ps- many of the printables I used in the Dental Health Unit can be found here at 3 Dinosaurs, at 2 Teaching Mommies, and at Pre-K Fun.

Dental Health Unit- Week 1

Hi Mom!
Did you know that February is Dental Health Month? Ms. Marianne has been looking forward to this unit all year long. :) It has so many fun activities and learning opportunities in it. We talked all about teeth this week- and we'll continue to do so next week as well.

We started by taking a look at our own teeth. We tried to count how many we have (20 baby teeth should be in our mouths) using a mirror. We discovered our gums and tongues too. Using non-fiction books (and touching again on fiction "make-believe" / "story" books vs.  non-fiction- "not a story" / "facts" books) we discovered that the part of the tooth that we can see in our mouths is called the crown of the tooth and the pointed / v-shaped part below the gums is called the root. We were introduced to and got to play with tools that the dentist uses to examine and clean our teeth with. Ms. Marianne told us a story about Tanya & Timmy Tooth- who were sad teeth being exposed to things like soda, ice cream and candy until they were cleaned and started eating things like carrots, broccoli and wheat bread, then they were happy teeth! After listening to her story, we got to use the dental tools to "clean" the bad foods away from Tanya and Timmy tooth so they could be happy teeth. The toothbrush, tongue cleaner, floss, toothpaste, gum scraper and mirror were all useful in making the teeth happy!

 To illustrate the Happy Tooth, Sad Tooth idea even more, Ms. Marianne made us special snacks!

They were both yummy, but we could see the difference between clean and unclean teeth... :)

 

 

We did a cut and paste activity where we sorted foods into groups that would make our teeth happy and sad and then glued them onto a tooth with a smiley face or frowny face accordingly. One friend said "I don't need to practice my cutting, because I'm already GOOD." hahaha! Well, my friend, practice makes perfect! Cutting is a challenging skill for sure, but we are getting more and more confident with each activity we participate in.



Some of the other activities we did this week included practicing skills we've already learned like the Conversation Heart patterns we made on our own this time by placing the candy hearts in a pattern and then coloring in the hearts on the paper. We're getting to be AMAZING at pattern creation and extending! 





 



 We strung laces through holes in teeth- another challenging skill that we'll continue to practice. One friend commented "Oh! This is like lacing a shoe." Good observation! Another friend said to herself: "I sew all the time. Sewing is fun for me. We just have to keep on sewing... keep on sewing!" :)  Lacing or "sewing" is great for practicing the pinch and the motor skill of pushing it through the hole and pulling it out the other side and not tangling it. If it does get tangled, then they have to figure out how to untangle it and continue on. Once they're done and all the holes have been laced through, they have to slowly pull the lace back out again. All of these motor skills help with pencil grip, handwriting, tying shoes and manipulating objects in general.

One of Ms. Marianne's favorite activities this week was our Marshmallow Mouths. So fun! And they helped us practice our skills of picking up, placing in a straight or curved line and gluing into place.

 

We also practiced brushing our teeth in "small circles" by using toothbrushes to clean dry erase marker off of laminated teeth...

 

and practiced flossing our teeth using yarn to get play dough "plaque" from between the "teeth" of a Duplo block... an activity Ms. Marianne found here.

 

We reviewed our letters and sounds by serving up some "Alphabet Soup". Each of us had a dish that Ms. Marianne ladled letters from our "soup" into. If we could tell Ms. Marianne the name and sound of the letter we were served, we got to keep it. Whomever had the most soup at the end of the game won! Our letter of the week was Yy. We're so close to the end of being introduced to all of the letters of the alphabet! Only 3 more letters to go.

 

Finally- for Science, we finished up our Candy Hearts Science activities by predicting the outcome of putting Conversation Hearts into different liquids. Ms. Marianne brought out three small glasses- one with vinegar, one with water and one with juice. She had us predict what we thought would happen to the candy hearts that we dropped into them. For vinegar, we predicted it would dance (yay for connecting to previous activities!), but it dissolved an actually left the shape of a heart on the bottom of the glass and turned the vinegar blue- the color of the heart we dropped in. For water, we predicted that it would sink to the bottom, and we were right! The heart also dissolved and turned the water yellow (the color of that heart). Finally, we predicted that the heart dropped into the juice would get mushy and fall apart. This happened... sort of. We talked about the word dissolved  and how it means basically their prediction description. The red juice turned slightly darker too, due to the dye in the green candy heart we dropped in. We made observations as the time passed, and then we formed conclusions when the hearts were completely dissolved. I wonder if the hearts would dissolve in other liquids too...? Maybe we could try to extend this experiment at home too!

day 1

day 2

 

Next week, we'll continue to learn about teeth- even visiting a real dentist's office on Tuesday!

 



Love,
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne

ps- many of the printables I used in the Dental Health Unit can be found here at 3 Dinosaurs, at 2 Teaching Mommies, and at Pre-K Fun.



Happy Valentine's Day!

Hi Mom,
I love you! This week was all about love and the letter Vv. V is for Valentines, Volcanoes and Very exciting things happening in preschool!

We began with a graphing activity to practice creating and reading bar graphs. We each got a giant handful of Hershey's Kisses and placed them by color on our labeled bar graph papers. When we had each placed all of our red, silver and pink wrapped kisses on our graphs, we compared the colors on our own graphs and compared our graphs to others. We answered questions like "Who has the greatest number of pink kisses?" and "Who has the least number of red kisses?" and "Does anyone have any columns with equal numbers of kisses?" We also practiced using the lines and labels on our graphs to read the amounts of each color kiss we had instead of counting them individually.


Since this week was Valentine's Day, Ms. Marianne helped us to make a special Valentine for you! She took pictures of us holding a sign that read "Be Mine" and then we painted and decorated a wooden frame to hold the picture. We also created a special Valentine out of a big foam heart and smaller Valentine stickers, puffy hearts and foam Conversation Hearts. Did you like my Valentine gift? I had so much fun making it for you!

There are so many great Valentine's Day books out there. This week, we read a few including: The Biggest Valentine by Steven Kroll, and The Night Before Valentine's Day (a variation of the famous Christmas poem) by Natasha Wing.

We also learned a new song! It is called "Will You Be My Valentine" and is sung to the tune or "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". It goes like this:

 

Will you be my Valentine?

Pretty please won't you be mine?

A kiss for you and a kiss for me,

I love you and you love me too.

Will you be my Valentine?

Pretty please won't you be mine?

 Candy is such a big part of Valentine's Day. We played with candies, but didn't really get to eat much... we were bummed by this! But we did get to play with them in many of the activities we did this week, like the Kisses graphing. We also used Kisses to do some beginning addition! Ms. Marianne gave us a worksheet in a plastic cover that we could write on. We'd pick out a number of Kisses (of our choice) and put them in the first circle, then do the same for the second circle and then write the corresponding numbers below the circles. Then we'd count all of the Kisses and write that number below the third circle. This created a basic number sentence / equation for us to read off and have Ms. Marianne check. For example: "Three pink Kisses plus four red Kisses equals seven Kisses in all!" We each worked with these sheets and the Kisses for about 4 number sentences.  We also used the brightly colored Conversation Hearts to match patterns that Ms. Marianne gave us and to make our own patterns too!






Candy also made it's way into Science this week. We did a science activity called Dancing Hearts that Ms. Marianne found at www.inspirationlaboratories.com. Here is a video that shows what our Dancing Hearts looked like!

From their website to explain the Science behind the Dancing Hearts: "Baking soda and vinegar react to form carbon dioxide, water, and a salt. Carbon dioxide gas are the bubbles you see during the reaction. The bubbles rise to the top lifting the candy hearts up. Bubbles leave the bottom of the candy heart, and the heart falls back down. The bubbles are essentially pushing the candy around making them seem to dance." All of us loved watching our colored heart dance around with our friends' hearts. :)




A huge highlight of this week was our VOLCANO eruptions! We talked about volcanoes and what makes them erupt. We used words like lava and magma. Then Ms. Marianne gave us each our own volcano and dinosaurs and showed us how to make them erupt using drops of vinegar & water. We had a BLAST playing with our volcanoes and dinosaurs. Some of us made the lava overtake the dinosaurs... and some dinosaurs even ended up IN the volcanoes! :) This was a great activity to talk about chemical reactions between ingredients (salt / baking soda / water / vinegar) and also practice our fine motor skill of pinching to fill and slowly empty the water dropper to make the eruption happen a bit at a time. We took home an extra pouch of the erupting powder so that we could play some more at home with our volcanoes and dinosaurs!







After some Valentine's Day fingerpainting for Art, we celebrated Valentine's Day with a party! Each friend brought a special treat from home and Valentines for each of the other students in class. We decorated Valentine mailboxes to collect our cards in, made a heart shaped pizza and then enjoyed our party time- snacking and sharing and smiling. :)

 Next week we will begin our Dental Health Unit... just in time to clean all of the sugar off our teeth that we ate today! :) We have some awesome activities planned!

Love,
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne