Valentines, Snow Days and Vacations Oh My!

Greetings from Snow Day Number Two!

Another short, action-packed week here at the SES Preschool!

We continued to practice greeting each other at meeting with either a high-five or hand shake, using our words and making eye contact. For calendar jobs we looked at the weather and counted our February calendar as a class. Both the AM and PM are getting to be quite the singers! We sang our "Days of the Week" and "I'm a Little Penguin" songs and also learned a new song about friendship in honor of Valentine's Day. It goes like this:


Make new friends
But keep the old
One is silver and the other is gold
A circle is round, it has no end
That's how long I will be your friend

We'll definitely be adding this to our repertoire and singing it more after February vacation! It was a good opportunity to learn two more words in sign language, too. "Friends" is signed by linking your two pointer fingers and "make" is signed like you're squeezing out a dish towel vertically.

We took advantage of an empty gym to run around on Monday and play syllable "Duck Duck Goose," a Preschool favorite! The kids also got to meet "Mr. Munch," our in-class letter-eating monster. Each student gets a foam upper-case letter and when their letter is called they feed it to Mr. Munch.

"I have a hungry friend
His name is Mr. Munch
And what he likes to do all day
Is gobble up his lunch
He likes the letter ______
And things that start with ________
And when he gets a letter
He eats it munch munch munch
CRUNCH!"

Puppet Show was introduced as a new Choice time center and this was hugely popular. It was really fun to see the kids using their imaginations and playing with friends who they
don't normally spend time with.

Knowing that the Thursday snow storm would probably change our Valentine's/Friendship Celebration in Preschool, we celebrated a little early on Wednesday by making heart shaped melon treats with cookie cutters and going all out with glitter and glue for our Valentine's mailboxes. We'll celebrate some more the Monday after vacation!

Have a fabulous February Vacation and see you Monday the 24th!

-Miss Kate and Miss Amanda

Our week in Preschool! February 3rd-7th

Hello!

It's that blogging time of the week once again!
I hope that everyone had a good relaxing snow day. The kids were pretty adorable slooooowly wading through the deep snow today...

We learned about penguins this week-where they live, what they eat, whether they can fly or not. The kids learned a new penguin song at Meeting/Circle Time to the tune of "I'm a Little Teapot." It goes like this:

I'm A Little Penguin

I'm a little penguin black and white
I like to waddle across the ice
When I reach the water I dive right in
I hunt for fish as I swim, swim swim

There are motions to go along with this, including the sign language for black and white which the kids can show you at home! They really like this one and usually want to sing it more than once. We've also still been singing our "Days of the Week" song, snapping and clapping away. Preschoolers were really into our "new" and "different" calendar this week now that it's February and we're still having Calendar Helpers at every Meeting.

We practiced some literacy with Syllable Duck-Duck Goose again this week and played some rhyming games. Some students also got to play a snowflake matching game with Miss Amanda! There ended up being a couple of Art Projects this week, which was fun. First, we read "Polar Bear, Polar Bear What do you Hear?" (and got to make animal noises to go along with the pictures) then kids got to make paper plate "masks," choosing either lions or elephants out of paper, yarn and buttons!

Our Thursday Art Project was part of our Penguin Unit. Kids used black and white paint, construction paper beaks and googly eyes to make mini penguins out of egg carton pieces that will be going home on Monday once they dry!

Next week we'll be focusing on love and friendship for Valentine's Day and will have a "Friendship Celebration" on Thursday.

Have a great weekend,

Miss Kate and Miss Amanda

The Week of January 27-30

Greetings Preschool Families,

We had a great week here in Preschool despite our tiny class sizes! Hoping that everyone is feeling better very soon.

Our theme this week in class was "Animals in Winter." Mrs. Kidder, our school librarian, showed us a neat video of a hibernating bear and we read alot about what animals around us here in New England do in the wintertime (including a quick shout out to Groundhog Day, including a Groundhog puppet visitor). Students got to make their own "Animals in Winter" pictures that we made into a book and for our Art Project on Thursday we used cardboard stamps and black paint to make bear and bird tracks! (Perhaps this will explain that painty black creation in your preschooler's folder). We then made our OWN tracks by tracing our shoe prints onto a long piece of white paper and writing our names underneath!

For Group Time, kids got to work on Math skills by sorting pattern blocks by shape and color, and for Literacy we worked on identifying the letters in our names and recognizing letters of the alphabet (and even their sounds!) with colorful flashcards.

We've also been playing "Syllable Duck-Duck Goose" in the gym, which is really fun. Kids are shown a picture, we say the word and clap it out as a class, and then the tagger splits the word into syllables as they tap kids heads. (Ie. el-e-phant) And then...let the running ensue!

It's been really nice to see the preschoolers starting to play together more on the playground, shoveling away with their mini snow shovels. Sounds like they'll get an opportunity for more shoveling after this weekend!

See you all Monday!

-Miss Kate and Miss Amanda

A short week! January 21-23

Our week may have been short but our time in school was full this week!
Since we weren't able to go outside we got to do some extra Art Projects, including making maracas out of toilet paper rolls, wax paper and rice (AM); snowy scenes with blue paint and salt (PM), and our own colorful mittens after reading Jan Brett's book "The Mitten" (both classes).

We learned a "Days of the Week" song at circle-time this week that some of the PM kids may remember from last year. It goes like this (to the tune of "The Adams Family Theme Song"):

DAYS OF THE WEEK

Days of the week (snap, snap or clap, clap)-repeat 5 times-
There's Sunday and there's Monday
There's Tuesday and there's Wednesday
There's Thursday and there's Friday
And then there's Saturday
Days of the Week (snap/clap, snap/clap) -repeat 5 times-

We'll be singing this some more this week to really get the hang of it!

Group time this week was spent exploring wooden curves and lines blocks as part of our "Handwriting without Tears" program. We talked about the difference between a curve and a line, as well as big and little, and kids were shown upper-case letters to make with their blocks (C, O, L, D, and P). Then they got to "freestyle" and play around to make whatever letters they wanted to!

For Math time we played a counting game with tiny cookies. Kids practiced looking at numbers, counting out cookies and were given basic number problems. "If I have 5 cookies and take away 1 then how many do I have left?"

We'll be learning more about animals in winter this coming week and will make our own Animals in Winter book as a class! See you all Monday!

-Miss Kate and Miss Amanda

Our week at Preschool: January 13-17

There was lots of activity in Preschool this week!

We have been talking alot about winter and the January calendar this week and just started having a Calendar Helper job at Circle Time/Meeting! The Calendar Helper gets to tell the class what the weather is outside and then points to the calendar numbers as we count all together. The kids are VERY excited about this new addition.

Our poem of the week was "The Chubby Little Snowman." Some of the students memorized it, but if you'd like to read it with them (and do the motions)here you go:

The Chubby Little Snowman

The chubby little snowman (put arms out like a big belly)
Had a carrot nose (put finger on nose)
Along came a bunny (make little bunny ears with two fingers)
And what do you suppose? (Shrug up shoulders)
That hungry little bunny (rub tummy)
Looking for its lunch (put hand over eyes)
Ate the snowman's carrot nose (make big chomping arms)
Nibble, nibble, crunch, crunch!! (move hands like a duckbill)

Kids got to draw pictures and write their own variations of "Golidilocks and the Three Bears" (loosely interpreted) for group time this week. You can find these hanging on the wall of our classroom! We also got to be "scientists" by using eye droppers to explore mixing different shades of food coloring and water. This was a great hands-on activity that really held everyone's focus!

On Wednesday and Thursday we played a mitten matching game for math group time and for literacy the kids wrote their names in sand. (Fun but tricky!)We also made our dress up area into a Doctor's Office this week. This is providing some really entertaining dialogue to eavesdrop in on: "Hey-could you get me a new finger? We lost one!" The kids are really getting into their roles as professionals :)

For our Thursday Art Project this week the AM class made toothpick and marshmallow sculptures-dogs, robots and stars to name a few- and the PM class made their own maraca shakers out of toilet paper roles and rice. Add some paint, glitter and feathers and you have one bedazzled musical instument!

Let's hope for another week of outside play time!

Have a great long weekend and see you all soon!!

Welcome Back! Our week of 1/6-1/9

Happy 2014 everyone!

And welcome to Miss Amanda! Amanda Linzi joined our class this week and will be with us until Mrs. Reid gets back. She is a great addition to the classroom and has fit right in already.

This week we read several versions of "Golidilocks and the Three Bears" and students got to choose their own bear (Mama, Papa or Baby) to make out of tissue paper for our Thursday Art Project. See if they know what "Golidlocks did first" or "how many bears" there are at home!

We talked alot about Winter and our January calendar, as well as reading a January poem from the book "Chicken Soup with Rice." We also got to practice our Yoga at Morning Meeting. The kids are getting to be experts!

For group time both AM and PM kids practiced writing their names on white boards and with silver crayons (super fancy) on black construction paper and for Math they got to make "caves" out of play dough and use little plastic counting bears to put in/take out of the cave to practice their early addition/subtraction skills.


It was so nice to have a full week back at school! Looking forward to seeing everyone on Monday for a week of some outdoor play!

Week of December 9 - 12

Wow, it's been a while!

Sorry for the delay everyone. With meetings happening on Fridays, I've been struggling to update the blog on a weekly basis.

This past week we started out Gingerbread Man unit. We have been reading lots of different versions of the "Gingerbread Man" and talking about how each book is the same or different from the others we've read. The kids really like picking up on the differences!

We even made our own "gingerbread man" stories which went home this week. The childred chose a person, animal, monster, etc. that their gingerbread man would run away from and then drew an accompanying picture. Their ideas were hysterical and their pictures were phenomenal!

Here's some examples of who the gingerbread man was running away from...
a monster
an alien
a fox
a pig
a cow
a robot

someone even said ... "me!" which I thought was quite clever!

We also played a gingerbread man themed dice game which the students have been playing for a couple of weeks. It's great to see them starting to yell out the number on the dice without even having to count the dots (that's what we want to see!). Students had to roll the dice, count the dots, then place the correct number of chips onto the corresponding number of gingerbread men. It's a game the kids really enjoy!

We made a little surprise for our families this week during our art project time. The kids are very excited to give you a present this coming week!

We also constructed paper gingerbread houses this week. Kids had a blast gluing on sequins, buttons, pom poms, and painting white snow. It got us thinking about making our real gingerbread houses next week!

Next week we will read a wonderful book by Jan Brett called "The Gingerbread Baby". I have lots of characters printed from the book, so we will have fun acting out the book as we read!

Miss Molly's last day will be Tuesday, December 17th.
December 20th will be my last day with the kiddos and as you come back from vacation, Miss Kate and Miss Mary will be ready to lead our class!

Thanks for reading!
Aleshia Reid