Our intrepid pre-schoolers have been busy exploring North America – the third largest continent following Asia and Africa.
Our exploration has involved looking at the history of Native Americans, the people from the pre-Colombian indigenous population and how they lived. We’ve also looked at some of the amazing animals that live there, including, Jaguars, Moose, Bison, Wolves and Bears.
To bring the theme to life, the children painted a lovely colourful tepee for our display board and decorated a big sheet of paper with traditional tepee designs. We also set up a tepee in home corner for the children to play in.
Craft
During our craft sessions, the children made some beautiful dreamcatchers – which Native Americans believed would give the creator good dreams – feather headbands, and a host of American Indian people crafted from cardboard and hand-prints.
Cooking
All this learning is hungry work. Our pre-schoolers have been busy cooking up some yummy North American themed treats, including tepee ice-cream cones, cheesy lassos and bear face pizzas.
Sensory Play
Nothing beats a bit of messy play and our pre-schoolers have had their hands in all kinds of wonderful gunk and gloop. There’s been water play and sand, shaving foam and glitter – the children had fun fishing out some familiar North American animals – dried lentils, shredded paper and dinosaurs.
Literacy and Maths
To develop the children’s reading and writing skills, we’ve been practising the letters A, B, C, D, E and playing phonics games to help them sound out words beginning with these letters.
To help raise awareness of certain sounds of words, we’ve used words associated with our North American theme to talk about how Native American Indians lived, kept warm and cooked.
We’ve also carried the theme into maths activities, for example, using feather beading to count how many and how long they are. The children have also been matching and pairing common shapes and learning addition and subtraction by using objects.
Our homemade dreamcatchers
Our colourful teepee