Fusion Beads

Fusion beads (or Perler Beads) are one of our classrooms favorite projects. It is a bead kid with plastic peg boards that holds beads in place. When the beads are placed on the board and the children are done with them they are able to be ironed (fused together) and kept as 3-D art projects.The beads are small, so they are great fine motor work, and they are colorful which can lead to experiments in patterning. Children use their creativity to not only pattern but create their own unique and detailed masterpieces. For instance, when placed correctly, the pegs in a star board can make a flower (bottom left) and with use of imagination projects become alive. The top picture is the beginning stage of a helicopter a child worked on for three days!

Main Focus Areas: fine motor skills, color matching, pattern exploration, social skills (sharing and helping each other with their projects), concentration and creative expression!

Journaling with Preschoolers!

Providing my children with their own journal that they can use to do absolutely whatever they want inside has proven to be one of the best ideas I've had. Journals are available to the children at any point in their day, they can even bring their journal to a quiet area with one writing utensil to journal. While working in their journals, children are never guided in a certain direction or given certain directions, they are doing their own free work and exploring their own creative minds.The work the children have produced so far is amazing.

Children explore writing letters, phonetic words, and names without guidelines. Children also explore drawing and using different art mediums to express themselves.

 Fusion Beading (explored in a later post) has been a huge hit in our classroom and children enjoy putting their bead projects into their journals for safe keeping.

Creative expression is a huge part in journaling for preschoolers. It gives them a binded notebook where they can keep their work.

Classroom Job Chart

Job charts in the preschool classroom help promote independence and responsibility. Children are responsible for taking care of different aspects of our room. Our jobs include:

Turtle Feeder: responsible for feeding the turtle
Electrician: responsible for turning on and off the light in the turtle tank

Chair Monitor: responsible for pushing in chairs after activities and making sure each child has a chair

Shoe Monitor: responsible for making sure there are no shoes left out to trip over

Lunch Helpers (two children): responsible for setting out lunch boxes before lunch time

Laundry Duty: responsible for bringing dirty cloths to washer and getting new clean cloths

Dish Duty: responsible for helping teachers empty the dishwasher and returning dishes

Calendar Helper: responsible for placing the new date on the calendar

Line Leader: responsible for being the first person in line and getting everyone to the correct area

Music Directors (two children): responsible for choosing our morning meeting songs

Librarians (two children): responsible for picking three new books off library shelves for the quiet area

Couch Friends (Day Off): Three friends get the day off and are allowed to sit on the couch during group meeting times
Messenger or Substitute: Fills in for anyone who may not be in class that day. If everyone is here they perform odd jobs that we may need assistance with


Our particular job chart has been redone multiple times and we are finally satisfied. Our job chart has pictures of each job hung up on a string in our quiet area. Each child has a cloths pin with their name on the back. Every morning we take the cloths pins down and have children take turns randomly picking other names. This process helps with letter/name recognition since each child is responsible for reading off and finding the person they have just picked. The cloths pins help with fine motor skills when pinning their names onto the picture. Recently, our class has been working with deductions and figuring out who is the last person to be picked when there is only one pin left. When new children come into our classroom it is easy to add jobs to incorporate everyone. 

Classroom Area Tags

Part of revamping our classroom we realized our Tigers needed a little extra attention towards transitioning between areas in our classroom. After brainstorming we decided that we would give Name Tags to each of the children with velcro strips on the back that they could attach outside of each area. Depending on how many children could be in the area there would be that many velcro strips outside of the area. So for instance in our Block Area there can be four children at a time there...so there are four velcro strips that children can put their names on.

It has been about a week since we have introduced our new area system and it is working out wonderfully. The kids are so excited to be able to get their names and bring them to every area they are in. We no longer have arguments about who can be in what area and when! Its simple if your name is there then so is your body!!