November 7-15

Our November has been off to a great start! Thank you all for such great conferences! It's so fun to catch up and let you see how hard each of your students have been working at school. We have started talking about Thanksgiving (especially turkeys) this week. We read some funny stories about turkeys disguising themselves so that they won't turn into the Thanksgiving turkey and turkeys that were running away from the farms. Each student then got to make their own colorful turkey that is now displayed out in our hallway for all to see. We've also talked about how many people eat a big meal to celebrate the holiday so we turned out kitchen center into a grocery store. It has been a huge hit so far! Next week we will focus more on things that we are thankful for and the real reason for Thanksgiving.

For our small groups this week, we worked on our letter Dd page, played a new game called "Slap Math", and sorted fruit loop cereal onto colored pipe cleaners (orange fruit loops on orange pipe cleaners. For slap math, each student had a card with a certain number of stickers on it. When I held up a number that matched their amount of stickers, they got to slap the table and keep my card. They really enjoyed that part of the game :)

Our "Science Friday" today was fun as usual. This time the students got to take over the experiment completely. We worked on weighing things and comparing which things weighed more, less, and the same. They each got to pick any one item around the room that they wanted. I then randomly called two students up and they got to compare who had a heavier or lighter object by placing their items in the balance tool. They really enjoyed it and liked that they were the ones doing everything by themselves. I left the balances out at center time so they could continue to experiment.

Next week we will continue on talking about Thanksgiving. We keep reading fun stories and focusing on rhyming words. I love how many of them are catching on to it so quickly. Our new letter next week will be Tt and our new number will be #6. As you saw, book orders were sent home today. There are many great books for Christmas gifts in there. I will also send home Dec. book orders soon as well so that all books will get here by Christmas time. Remember to let me know if you don't want your child to see any of the books when they come in. Thank you all for being such wonderful parents and families. We really enjoy having each of these children in our classroom!

Catch Up! End of October Fun!

It's time to catch up again! I cannot believe that October has come and gone! We have done lots of fun things at school over the past two weeks. We finished up talking about pumpkins. I'm sure you noticed a lovely decorated pumpkin that was brought home. It was fun to let each student decorate it however they wanted. We have also continued working on rhyming and making patterns. We have a new tricky pattern for the November calendar. I'm anxious to see how quickly they can catch onto it! We also started practicing counting the syllables in their names. That's a hard one to learn. Don't be surprised if they come home clapping out their names. They really seem to think it's a fun "game". Another new thing we talked about was Mat Man. We have a song that talks about all the parts of Mat Man and we lay down each part on the carpet as we sing along (head, eyes, nose, body, arms, hands, etc).

Last week we did some fun Halloween activities. On Thursday we did three small group rotations with some fun games. The first one we had was Halloween BINGO and the students got to use plastic spiders to place on their cards. That made the game so much more fun in their eyes! The next activity was acting out the book "Five Little Pumpkins"while I read it. They each got to use a paper gate and pumpkins to place on it. The last game was a relay race. They had to place a plastic spider on a spoon and walk across the carpet and place it into a plastic pumpkin. We finished up the week with our fun pajama day!

Other big highlights:

Science! The students continue to love our "Science Fridays". Lately we have done a dancing raisins experiment and an experiment where we mixed baby oil, water, and glitter. For dancing raisins, we placed raisins in a bottle of club soda. The raisins first sank to the bottom, and then after a little time, they started floating up to the top and dropped right back down. They sure thought that was a funny to see them "dancing".

Gym! We got out some fun new things at gym the past couple gym days. The first gym time we had three fun new stations: balance beam, bean bag toss, and trampolines! Last week we tried out scooters for the first time! These were a huge hit! We even tried connecting them all together and making one big train. We had so much fun so us teachers even had to try them out. The students enjoyed seeing their teachers act like kids :)

I hope this post brings you up to date with all that we have been up to in preschool!

October Fun!

Finally! A new preschool post! As always, we've been busy little bees the past couple weeks. One big highlight was the pumpkin patch field trip. The weather was perfect and there was so much fun stuff to do. I'm working on putting together some pictures from the field trip and I'll try to share those with you all soon! It was also great to see so many of you at our big open house. I love seeing how proud the students are to show off all their work to their families and to show everyone around their room. It was definitely a fun evening!

We have continued talking all about fall and especially pumpkins! The kitchen center has now turned into our very own pumpkin patch. We took a closer look at the inside and outside of the pumpkins as well. It was fun to see them dig around in the inside of the pumpkins and to hear how they describe how it looks and feels in their own words. Another new exciting thing this past week was introducing the iPads to the students! We started learning how to use them and all the rules that go with it in a small group and then they were able to explore with them during center time. It's amazing how much they already know about them at such a young age! Our other small groups worked on counting and the letters in their name. For counting, the students had to count out real pumpkins seeds and match the amount of seeds to a pumpkin that had a number written on it. For their name practice we played the name erase game. On a marker board we helped them write out their name. Miss Lynne then held up letters of the alphabet one at a time, and if the students had that letter in their name they had to erase that letter off their board. It was fun to see who could keep letters on their board the longest.

We also had some exciting "Science Fridays"! Last week we went on a fall walk outside. The students were partnered up and each pair was given a clipboard with certain fall items to look for. It was great to see them work as a team and look for each thing along the way. The other fun science activity was predicting items that would sink or float in a tub of water. The students were pretty surprised that our apple and little pumpkin actually floated. Each student had a sink/float card and before each object they held up the card that they thought it would be. It's fun to let them think about each object and why or why not they think it might sink. It always amazes me how well they can predict and come up with valid reasons for their ideas.

Each class has now experienced their first fire drills! Both classes did such a great job and followed all directions really well. As you can imagine, it's a pretty loud noise but they all handled it just fine! The two classes have also learned the valuable lesson of how it is always a good idea to clean up at center time quickly. We learned that if we don't do our jobs right away, we might lose out on something fun later which is usually recess. I think they'll catch onto this idea fast because losing recess was a pretty big deal :)

This week we will continue some fun fall activities and practice our new skill that was introduced last week...rhyming! The students will also have the chance to practice making letters with our foam pieces (big lines, little lines, big curves, and little curves). I'm sure we will have lots of great things to share at the end of the week.

Preschool Update: Sept. 30- October 4

I can't believe that it's October already! Where has all the time gone? It was another great week in preschool! We finished up all of our activities with apples and prepared for our big field trip this next week to the pumpkin patch by starting some pumpkin activities. Our small groups this week focused on shapes, writing our names, and our letter B. We worked on our letter B page by painting with a balloon. I love seeing the surprised looks when I told them that they could paint with a blown up balloon. It's the small things that seem to excite the kids! Our second group was practicing writing our names. First they trace over their name and then practice writing it on their own. For right now we are practicing using the uppercase letters and will begin using lower case letters as time goes on. Our last group was making pictures with shapes. The students were given many different shapes on their tables and they got to create pictures out of them. We got some really creative creations and they will be on display for our open house this Thursday (5-7pm).

The students are so excited for the field trip to the pumpkin patch this week and so are we! We prepared for our trip by talking about how pumpkins grow during our "Science Friday". Hopefully you heard about that a little bit at home. We talked about the life cycle of a pumpkin and are looking forward to seeing the actual pumpkins and vines at the pumpkin patch. The students also made their own unique pumpkins that will be displayed out in the hallway for open house. We have some very cool creations to show off! This coming week we will continue all of this pumpkin fun as well as introduce our new letter F and the number 3.

As mentioned before, Madison's open house will be this Thursday, October 10 from 5-7 pm. This is a great time to come check out our room again and see all the things your child has been working on. I will also have a table set up to let you know of some things that you can donate to our classroom if you'd like. We have lots of fun ideas and activities in our room that require lots of supplies that aren't always provided by the school. You are welcome to bring grandmas and grandpas and any others that would like to see what a day at preschool is like. It will a busy classroom that night so it will be a time for your student to show you around the room and we'll save the playing for school days. We hope that we can see you there!