It is important for young preschool students to learn about a doctor’s job and what doctors do. There can be some anxiety about visiting the doctor’s office. They all associate getting shots at the doctor’s office. It is important to teach them that doctors are for helping them stay healthy.

The preschool students enjoyed a visit from a real family practice doctor who talked about ways to keep healthy bodies: eating healthy foods, getting proper exercise and adequate sleep, and washing hands often.

They got to touch and experience real tools used by a doctor. They were able to listen to their heartbeats with a stethoscope, put on real  rubber gloves, and pretend to give shots with a syringe (with no needle included, of course).

The preschool students enjoyed caring for and watching real caterpillars grow and form a chrysalis. Read that post by clicking here.

Over the weekend and the early part of this week, they enjoyed seeing the butterflies hatch out of the chrysalis. The students set the butterflies free outside.

This is a fun experiment for young students to watch and experience the full life cycle.

We recently created extra riding space for our preschool students. Our playground only has one short sidewalk in which to ride back and forth. Our playground is located across the parking lot from the building. We placed a barricade at the crosswalk so no vehicles can pass through the short alley between the building and our playground.

Now we are able to use that alley for a larger riding area. The students take the big wheels and riding toys out to that alley. The fun part: the alley has a slight incline. They ride to the ‘top’ of the incline on the road/alley and coast or ride faster ‘downhill’ on the sidewalk.

Great fun for outdoor play and exercise.

One very fun activity for preschool students in the spring is caring for and watching caterpillars grow and form their chrysalis and then morph into butterflies.

Once again we have adopted our very own caterpillars, ordered from The Butterfly-Lady. We ordered our caterpillars to be delivered during a specific week and were getting concerned when they did not arrive when expected, but thankfully they arrived a couple of days after the anticipated date.

These caterpillars have done well and have done everything expected. They arrived in the plastic cup with food on the bottom of the cup. There were detailed instructions for care and proper placement in the classroom. We placed our caterpillar cups on the Science center shelf towards the middle of the room out of direct light.

In a few days the caterpillars grew larger and crawled to the top of the cup. They formed their chrysalis and attached themselves to the white paper underneath the lid.

As soon as all the caterpillars were hanging from the white paper on the lid, we made a butterfly house out of a cardboard box. We are waiting for the butterflies now…