Valentine's Day Party

Our Valentine's Day party is on  Wednesday, February 19th.  Please remember to send in the items you signed up for last week in addition to any Valentine cards.

Parent / Teacher Conferences

This year our school has chosen to do conferences a little different. Instead of having one night for conferences we will be scheduling them individually based on your schedule and mine. We will be sending home your child's progress reports on Friday,February 28th. We ask that you please review all sections and comments and fill out the form on the first page.  The form on the first page will tell you when I am available for conferences as well as give you a choice to have a conference. Conferences are not mandatory so if you feel you have a good understanding of your child's progress based on the report I give you, you are not available to come in for conference, or would prefer phone or email communication that is simply your choice.

I personally enjoy meeting with all of the families each year because I have found it is really a great time to discuss how your child is doing in school and at home.  At this point of the year we can really come together as a team to discuss any concerns you or I might have, but haven't had the opportunity to discuss during our short interactions in the morning and afternoon.  Our conferences should only be about fifteen minutes long and I will be available before school(8-8:30),after school (2:40-3:30), and during school on Fridays. I look forward to working together to have a successful last half of our year as we transition all of our children into Kindergarten next year.

Letter Nn & Number 14

Last week, in between all our snow days, we learned about letter Nn and number fourteen. We also worked on our first names as you can see in our pictures below. We will soon be moving on to learning to write our last names so we have been transitioning the children to writing their names with help to now having them writing them on their own.  When helping your child with their homework please reinforce writing their name by starting with an uppercase letter followed by lowercase letters.

This week we will be starting by reviewing our number and letter while doing some fun Valentine's Day crafts. Our class will be celebrating Valentine's day this Friday. Please send your child to school on Friday wearing either red, pink, or purple. Our class is in need of small empty glass jars, anything smaller than a pasta sauce jar.  If anyone has younger children who eat baby food we will gladly take your empty jars.  If you have any please email me or let me know in school. We are looking to have them by Wednesday.  If you don't have any please do not worry.

Please check your email for information I sent out last week about Valentine's Day.

Homework is due by Wednesday.  If your child already handed in their homework and you would like some extra practice please contact me and I can send home additional homework in your child's folder.

Letter Mm & Number 13

We had such a fun week learning about letter Mm!  We started the week by reading Marvin the Monkey and singing silly songs about monkeys.  We read the beautiful book, " The Mitten" by Jan Bret.  We retold the story and then made our own colorful mittens.  We learned all about the number thirteen.  We also had a great time working with M & M's in our Math Center counting them and making patterns with them. On Wednesday and Thursday we had fun M & M Math days.  We all had our own M &M's that we first sorted by color and then graphed.  This class had the most blue M &M's!  On Thursday we worked on making patterns. We each received a pattern card and had to match the candies to the pattern and determine what color would finish the pattern.  We then were able to make our very own patterns and of course eat some M &M's! On Friday, we read our Scholastic books about shadows and watched a video about shadows.  We learned how to make shadows and made our own!  We also read about book about Groundhogs Day and made groundhog crafts.

Please look out for some more information about Valentine's Day, our 100th Day celebration, and
parent conferences soon.  Our meeting in school was delayed due to the snow day.

A Very Snowy Week

With the short week, we had lots of winter fun! We read,"The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats and made our own snowy day pictures.  We read the story "Snowman Magic" by Katherine Tegan and pretended to make snowmen and had our own pretend snowball fight! After the snowball fight the students were amazed to find a number inside their paper snowball and had a great time putting all the numbers in order.  We also read the story, " I'm Like You, You're Like Me!" by Cindy Gainer. This story did a wonderful job at showing how we celebrate our differences.  We also made paper snowflakes and discussed how just like snowflakes we are all different and it is our differences that make us special and unique.

This week we are back on schedule learning about letter Mm and number thirteen. Due to our shortened previous week, I was not able to incorporate all the Jan Brett books into our lesson so we will be reading them through the next few weeks. This week we will read " The Mitten".

Letter Ll & Number 12

Last week we focused on Letter Ll with Larry Lion. We learned all about lions and made lion puppets! Through the week we also learned about ladybugs. We read, " The Grouchy Ladybug" by Eric Carle and watched a video about ladybugs and how the grow and change.  We also painted our own beautiful paper plate ladybugs.  We worked on number twelve on Wednesday and Thursday.  We had a wonderful picture day this last Wednesday and had some fun taking pictures in our classroom.  Please see the bottom of this email for some nice class pictures and some silly pictures too!

 

This week we will be discussing Martin Luther King Jr. with the children and what he stood for.  We will be focusing on being kind, friendly, peaceful, and fair.  With the short week we will not be focusing on a specific letter or number.  We will be reading wonderful books by the author Jan Brett.

 

 

Lovely Ladybugs!

 

A photographer was born!

Silly Photo on Picture Day ;)

Letter Kk & Number 11

Last week we focused on getting back into our normal schedule and daily routines.  We learned all about letter Kk with Katy Kangaroo.  On Monday we talked about the diamond shape, the type of weather needed to fly a kite, and we painted our own kites.  Through the week we talked about marsupials with a focus on kangaroos and koalas.  We also had so much fun making hand print koalas! On Wednesday and Thursday we reviewed numbers 1-10 with different activities and songs all while learning our new number eleven.  Through the week we also worked on learning how to spell and recognize color words.

 

Starting this last Monday we have begun to put more focus on learning some short site words.  In our curriculum we have a list of site words for each letter of the week.  I have been using these sites words in our morning messages on the white board since September. In the first half of the year I was introducing periods to show the end of a sentence, questions marks to ask a question and so on.  We also would look for the letter of the week and words that start with the letter of the week.  At this time of the year we have added a chance for each of the students to use our word finder pointer to find words that they already know.  If you have seen our white board these are the words underlined that we all then recite.  We also have other site word learning center games and puzzles that are available for the students to choose to work with.  It is important to know that I am not expecting the children to know all of these site words, but I do believe it is important to expose them to these words during the last half of the year in Pre-K.  If any parents are interested please email me directly and I can give you a copy of these words.

 

This week we are focusing on letter Ll and number twelve.

 

 

Reminders:

 

Picture Day is this Wednesday January 15th.

 

We are closed on Monday, January 20th.

 

Circle time starts at 9AM. Please try to have your child in school and unpacked by 9AM.  I do like to wait for all children to arrive before starting because it is such an important part of our day.

 

If your child will be absent from school, please try to remember to email me or call the school to let us know.  I do try to check my email first thing each morning, during lunch, and at the end of the day.

 

If you are utilizing before-care our doors open at 7:30 AM and then reopen at 8:30AM for our normal day.  Aftercare begins at 2:35 PM in Ms. Kathleen's classroom.