Neighborhood Walk

Last week at the Fox Hill School PreK/Kindergarten we started learning about maps, our community and the people in our community. So what better way to learn about your community than to actually go and explore it! So went on a walking field trip of our neighborhood. The week before we made arrangements with some of the local businesses in town for our kids to come visit their stores. We walked into Danvers center and sat under the hair dryers at Fantastic Sams, saw how paint is mixed and sat on all the tractors at Danvers Hardware, saw how the cakes and frosting are made at Cakes for Occasions, explored all the fun things for pets at the New England Dog Biscuit Company, took a tour of the Danvers Fire Department and ended our trip with lunch at the New Danvers House of Pizza! Phew! Here is a montage of our fabulous trip:

Click on the books below to purchase from Amazon some of the books we read during our study of maps and our community!

Boston Strong

Carter Lucido, Fox Hill School alumni, is currently a 1st grader in Georgetown. He was invited to read two of his poems in front of the Georgetown School Committee last night at Town Hall and it was also on TV. This is one of the poems he wrote and recited in front of the school committee. I am so proud and touched I wanted to share it with everyone.

Boston Strong

by Carter Lucido

Big friendship

One fund

Super police

Tall police

One criminal left

Next month the criminal will be gone

So many nice people

The people came together

Russian brothers

Our great survivors

No more hurting

Great news

Boston is Strong

Savvy Sand Toy Storage

The giant sandbox is one of the busiest areas on our playground. Sometimes we will bury "treasures" in the sand and see how long it takes the kids to find them. The treasures might be shells, fancy rocks, Hot Wheels, or other little trinkets. In addition, we always have shovels, sifters, rakes and sand molds in the sand box. In the past, all of the sand toys could be a little overwhelming at clean up time. If the toys do not have an obvious, organized place to be stored, the kids will just leave them out for us to clean up. Since we are always encouraging independence in the kids and consideration for our classroom (indoor or out!), we felt it was important to have an easy system the kids could use to store the sand toys themselves. I found these colored wire baskets at the dollar store and attached them to the fence next to the sand box with zip ties. Now the kids have a convenient and fun place to put the sand toys when they are finished using them!

The Outdoor Classroom

At the Fox Hill School we don't just view our play yard as a place for kids to let off steam. We see it as an outdoor classroom: a place where kids can explore, learn and have fun during their recess time. This week we'll be focusing on some of the new activities we have in our "outdoor classroom" that the parents helped us create/renew on Parent Playground Day!
Up until now we have had outdoor easels in our play yard as seen in this link. The kids loved being able to paint outside, but we found that we would hang up the paintings to dry outside and they would be forgotten. So one of the things we have used to replace the easels is an outdoor chalkboard. As you may know, typical chalkboard paint is not waterproof so we had to do a little research to find a solution. Leave it to Martha Stewart to figure out how to make waterproof chalkboard paint! We are fortunate to have a Home Depot in our neighborhood and they donated the supplies for this project (thank you Home Depot!). We started with a 4 ft. by 8 ft. piece of plywood and used Martha's paint to cover all sides. We used 1 cup outdoor paint (tinted black) mixed with 2 tablespoons of grout to make the chalkboard paint. Once it was dry we screwed it into the fence in our play yard and voila! - outdoor chalkboard! Chalkboards encourage, literacy, art, and  fine motor skills just to name a few! Very easy addition to a school yard or back yard!

Parent Playground Day!

This weekend we had our annual Parent Playground Day! The winters here in Massachusetts are usually quite rough on our playground, so each year in the spring we call on the talents of our parents to help us spruce up our playground. Parents help by painting, landscaping, making minor repairs, and preparing our garden for the kids to plant. Parents who are unable to attend can donate flowers or soil. This is a great event for parents to spend some time getting to know each other and their kids' teachers, as well as making the school more beautiful for their children. The kids are so excited to know that "Mommy and Daddy" did all these things to make their playground beautiful and fun! This year we added a magnet maze wall and a huge chalkboard and redesigned our system for storing sand toys in addition to all the landscaping, painting and garden preparation. Phew! We are very lucky to have families at our school that like to be involved with the program.  We couldn't do it without them.  It literally does take a village! Here is a montage our our morning yesterday:

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Mastering Mondrian

As we studied many of the great artists in our focus book, Vincent Van Gogh's Cat, we branched out to learn about some more modern artists, too. One of them was Piet Mondrian. Many of his paintings are made with straight lines and primary colors so his art was fun and easy for the preschoolers to use as a model. 

We used heavy card stock and taped black painter's tape in various straight line patterns on the paper. Then the kids used tempera paints to make their Mondrian-style creation. Many of these were displayed at our FHS Art Show!

Another activity the  kids explored was to try and make a Mondrian-style "painting" in the block area! We supplied them with primary colored pieces of construction paper in various sizes and challenged them to create something that looked like a Mondrian painting. 

It was amazing to watch them putting the pieces together! Each group of kids had their own strategy about how to do it. Not only was this a fun way to explore art, but a great activity for spacial relations, too!

Click on the pictures below to purchase these great art books from Amazon.

The Art Show!

The Fox Hill School was on April Vacation last week. Before our week off we had our annual art show! This year the show featured kids' work from both of our programs: PreK kids from the Fox Hill School and all the kids from the Fox Hill School PreK/Kindergarten! As they say - a picture is worth a thousand words so click below to view a montage with photos from our art show.

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