Come and visit and find out about our program!
Saturday, March 10th, 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM

Rocky Hill Cooperative Nursery School is a wonderful place for children to learn and grow! Since 1957, parents, teachers and families have worked together to provide a warm, nurturing environment for preschoolers!  Families and Community are a priority here! From  Little Miss Muffet to Monet; the farmyard to the Louisiana Bayou;  the Itsy Bitsy spider to Louis Armstrong; apple picking to visiting turtles and snakes, we provide a wealth of hands on experiences and learning! Our intergenerational activities with our “Grandfriends” at Stonebridge Assisted Living inspire kindness, caring, understanding, and a lot of fun!  We are now a qualified provider of the licensed Music Together Preschool program, and a member of Parent Cooperative Preschool International.  We’re so much more than just a little Nursery School!

We like to experiment with different types of homemade “dough.” In addition to measuring, stirring, etc, the children get to compare and contrast texture, how well it molds, the feel, the smell, the look…
This week’s adventure was “cloud dough.” It’s similar to “moon sand” that you buy in stores, and simply made with flour and baby oil.

And, if you give preschoolers a bag of flour and a bottle of baby oil… they’re going to make a mess! No problem here!

At RHCNS, children experience developmentally appropriate, hands-on learning.
“Science” isn’t a separate activity, it’s part of what we do everyday.

Children can choose to paint:

And choose from a variety of brushes and texture tools.

Or dig:

We make things:

They can play the piano:

Or play musical instruments to the babies after they’ve taken them to the doctor’s and the truck has made a delivery!

We haven’t had any snow since October, so we’ve been making some of our own! Today the children had a chance to make their own batches of salt clay dough.
We read the book, All You Need for a Snowman, and I’d anticipated seeing a lot of little snow people and creatures! Instead, we had wonderful creations with very detailed stories!
First, we had to make our dough.
Then we mixed and kneaded….

Added glitter:

And a lot of imagination!

What did this activity require? Measuring, counting, following written directions, following verbal directions, tactile stimulation, fine motor development, estimation and a LOT of creativity! Their stories about their creations are amazing!

After reading No Two Alike by Keith Baker, we compared different objects with our younger group. After comparing and contrasting some wooden blocks, I brought out our toy guinea pig.

I asked them to tell me about it.
“It’s black and brown and white. It has four feet. It has two ears. It has two eyes. It’s fuzzy. You can squoosh it. You can put it on your head. You can throw it!”

Then I brought out Courtesy, one of our guinea pigs.

“We can’t squoosh her! We can’t throw her!” (Can you put her on your head?) “NO!” “She has four feet, two eyes, two ears, she’s soft, she’s black and brown and white and black!”

The discussions continued, using words such as similar, alike, alive, pretend, soft, shiny, and many more.

Are they alike?

“Almost, almost, but not quite!”

What about….

Often we take ideas from books we’re reading and expand them! We read No Two Alike by Keith Baker. No two snowflakes are alike, no two animal tracks, “almost, almost, but not quite!”
In our Pre-K class, we also read, Big Tracks, Little Tracks, and learned about how to tell which way animals were going and even how fast they were going!
We tried making animal tracks in different substances.

Then the children “tracked” animal (and human) “tracks” in the classroom… (and practiced writing their letters, too!)

When we went outside, we found REAL tracks!

Today we went to Stonebridge Assisted Living and had Music Together with our wonderful grand friends. They even had cookies and juice ready for us!

Absolutely! I’m posting from the NAEYC conference, and have been in workshops since 8:00AM. It’s vital that I keep up to date and learn new techniques! I’m staying in touch with the children via email! So far today I’ve learned about marketing, big body play, parents, teaching approaches and now waiting for “Adapting the classroom for boys!”

The day after our farm trip, we made a hayride, picked pumpkins and milked a goat.. IN OUR CLASSROOM! The “small group” of fours created a hayride out of a box and some newspaper, and painted our very own goat! With the help of a glove, we were able to once again “milk” a goat! We “traveled” by hay wagon to our very own pumpkin patch!