A great way to learn about the children at the beginning of a preschool year, as well as making each child feel comfortable and welcomed is to make a book titled: All About Me. Some teachers prefer to work on this memory type book throughout the preschool year. This article suggests pages to work on for a week or two at the beginning of the preschool year, to then present to the parents as the first art project. The parents will be happy to receive such a gift from their children and in so doing; it starts the preschool year off with a good start.
Creating the Pages for Preschool
Many of the pages for an All About Me book can be found online and then printed off, or the pages can be created by the preschool teacher first with the original pages being saved in a curriculum folder for future use. If the pages have all the printing down ahead of time, then it will reduce the work for the teacher as he/she will simply photo copy the required amount of pages needed. A good idea is to finish one page per class as the teacher will be required to fill in the answers of the children or other details with each page, which requires allocated time. The parents love reading the answers that come out of their child's mouth which is an important feature of the entire project.
"Look How Big I Am!": A Page Recording Preschool Children's Height and Weight
To begin the book, record the weight and height of each child on a page title, "Look How Big I Am!" This page can have a picture of a girl or boy which can be coloured in. Alternatively, older preschool children can be left a space to draw a picture. Perhaps, the teacher might chose to place in a photograph of the child instead which could be taken at school or provided by the families. Another page under this category can be titled, "When I Get Older, I Want to Be....". On this page, a preschooler will have his/her foot or hand traced (or both) and then the answer to the title can be filled in by the teacher. Similarly, a child's handprint can be made by being dipped into paint.
All About Me: The Question and Answer Page
This page can be altered to meet the requirements of the teacher's curriculum and philosophy. Sometimes this page is titled, "My Favourite Things". There will be a number of questions to ask the children and the answers will be written out. Some classic questions to ask are:
- My favourite color is...
- One of my favourite TV shows is...
- I like to eat...
- I don't like to eat...
- One of my favourite toys is...
- I am special because...
Me and My Family
One suggestion for this page is to provide each child with the basic tracing of a house made out of popsicle sticks, which the children can then glue on themselves. They can color or decorate the sticks before hand. The page can be titled, "In My Home You Will Find..."
Magazine Collage Page
This page can be a glueing activity for the preschool children to find things they like in an array of pictures cut out of magazines, and/ or pictures found off the computer. The latter choice works well for there are no pictures found on the other side as with magazines. The collage page can be fun to make and many parents will smile when they see what their child chose to glue onto the page.
The Completed Project
There are many more pages that can be placed into the book, and as stated before, this might be a book that a teacher chooses to work on throughout the preschool year. Finish the book off with a cover providing the title of the book, preschool it was made in, child's name, and the year it was completed. The parents will be happy to have this memento to keep in their collection of memories.
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Further reading suggestion: All About Me Songs
