One of the fan favorites this morning was a tray with several locks and keys. The locks were programed with a capital letter on one side and a picture of what a word that starts with that letter on the other. The keys also had a lower case letter and its matching upper case letter on the other side. This letter matching combined with the fine motor aspect made this quite a challenge. But the boys and girls LOVED it! They spent quite a bit of time working to figure out how the keys went into the locks and that turning the key opened the lock. Only the locks with our first initials were laid out. I thought the entire alphabet would be too overwhelming at this point. Definitely a game to revisit.
We also throughly enjoyed playing with Alphabots. They are a type of transformer. They start out as letters and with a twist and a turn they become robots. Playing with letters is an awesome way to learn.
Once we dried off we were introduced to a real robot, Ozobot. This is an amazing little coding robot that is perfect for preschoolers. Ozobot reads colors, red, green, blue, and black. As he passes over the colored lines his light changes to reflect the color of line he is walking on. For advanced children you can but the colors together to give Ozobot commands to speed up, spin around, move backwards. It is such a fun little robot. I made the first map Ozobot followed and then the children had the chance to make their own maps for him.