Last week in preschool we got a little creative and brought in a different medium for learning. If you haven’t played with shaving cream, it’s a must! Some of the great properties of shaving cream: it’s white so nothing will get stained by its use, it smells good, and kids LOVE the squishy, foamy texture.

My class is moving to kindergarten in the fall (sad face) and so we have really been working on getting them ready for writing. Learning to write is a lot of repetition. Kids get sick of doing the same things over and over again (unless it is something to do with Frozen and then they will do it until they are blue in the face). I have been trying to come up with new ways to practice our letter writing and then…enter shaving cream. Imagine their little 5 year old faces when I squirt a pile of shaving cream right on the table in front of them. Pure joy! They are allowed to get their hands “dirty” and they love it. For about 5 minutes I wrote letters on the whiteboard and they did their best to copy what I wrote onto the table with shaving cream. I had their attention for 5 whole minutes! Tactile learning does a child good. After we practiced our letters I let them make whatever they wanted. Some just spread their pile as far as they could while others drew pictures or wrote their name. We had a great day writing.

Another activity with a dual purpose of letter recognition and small motor control was our teeth brushing station. Giant mouths with teeth were laminated and then letters were written on the teeth with a dry erase marker. The students were to take the toothbrush, dip it in the toothpaste (shaving cream), and then brush the letter that the teacher called out. My goal is to have every student recognize all letters by the time they graduate preschool and we are almost there. Incorporating fun ways to master these skills is the key to success.