When the cold temperatures of winter end and spring blooms, we see new life all around us. Use this theme of rebirth in your preschool classroom around the first day of spring. The class can plant seeds in small flowerpots and monitor their growth. Alternatively, to reduce the mess, have just one plant in the classroom, and encourage students to observe its growth. Teachers can create new life bulletin boards, including pictures of animals and their young. Have students match the babies to their mothers. You can include photos of ducks and chicks, caterpillars and butterflies and tadpoles and frogs.
The adage “April showers bring May flowers” holds true every spring, so use this saying to teach the students about spring weather trends. Create a bulletin board that you divide into two sections, April and May. Include rainy day images like raindrops, puddles and umbrellas for April and sunshine, blue skies and blooming flowers for May. Discuss the benefits of rain with preschoolers. Explain to them how the rain allows new flowers and plants to grow. Wind often picks up in the springtime, so on a windy day, you can take a kite outside and show students how the wind controls it.
Mother’s Day takes place on the second Sunday in May, so have students create take-home gifts for mom, grandma or other female caregivers that week. Purchase small terracotta flowerpots, and have students decorate the pots with fingerpaints, sequins and glitter. Enchanted Learning suggests creating a butterfly card for mom on Mother’s Day using construction paper and your preschoolers’ creativity. To coincide with the crafts, create an “I Love My Mom Because…” bulletin board, and assist the children to draw or write why they love their mothers. This display will be a welcome treat for mothers when they pick their preschoolers up at the end of the day.
Display student artwork and introduce facts about spring with bulletin board displays. For example, have students paint large white raindrop paper cutouts with blue and hang them on the top of the bulletin board. Ask students to glue colored cupcake liners to green pipe cleaners and attach them to the bottom of the board to show that spring rain helps the flowers grow and bloom. Teach preschoolers about the life cycles of birds by creating a large nest on the bottom of the bulletin board using strips of brown construction paper. Place paper cutouts shaped like eggs into the nest. Talk about how bird parents sit on their eggs until they hatch. A few days later, give students paper cutouts of baby birds and craft feathers. Have the students glue the feathers to the birds and attach them to the bulletin board in place of the egg cutouts.