We had a super first week of school making friends! We read a lot about being nervous/scared to go to school and talked about how good we felt when we actually got there with our friends and our teacher. We learned a lot about our feelings and our friends' feelings. We enjoyed reading three of the books from the Chester Racoon Series by Audrey Penn (including "The Kissing Hand.") We had lots of fun learning our music to movement songs, "We Are The Dinosaurs," "Let's Go Swimming" and "Hello Neighbor." We have been layering in more and more pieces of our morning calendar time. This includes morning prayer, counting through the days on the calendar to find out what today is, discussing the month, dressing the Weather Bear, getting our Kindness Dust on every morning, and learning the pledge of allegiance.
In religion, we learned about Jesus' apostles and the story of him calling Peter and Andrew, James and John to be his apostles. We talked about Jesus calling his special friends to follow him and how He invites each one of us to the very same thing. They should have brought home a paper on it Friday- the bible verse and story will always be on the back and some ideas on additional activities you can do with your child are also on the back.
We have also been working on how to hold our crayon (we are starting writing this year with a crayon as that is what is proportionate to our little hands.) We will be using small pencils to write with this year, as well, as that is what our handwriting curriculum recommends. I have seen firsthand what a difference it can make for a pencil grip when we give a preschooler the chance to use a smaller utensil that they can actually get their fingers on. They are doing amazing!! If you ask them they might even be able to tell you about the "Pick Up A Crayon" Song. We will be doing various fine motor activities throughout the year to strengthen our fingers. One thing you can work on with your child at home is writing their name. We will begin practicing this next week. We will be writing the first letter capital and the remaining letters lowercase. Please don't worry if they don't have it yet, we will be practicing all year! :)
In science, we explored caterpillars and got to see some eggs on a leaf, some newly hatched caterpillars, and several different kinds of adult caterpillars. Thank you Mrs. Hunter for sharing your garden caterpillars with us!
Last but certainly not least, we had three birthdays this week! Brysen had his on Tuesday and Finn and Colin had theirs on Thursday. Fun, Fun, Fun! Thank you parents for the delicious treats!
I'm so excited for the year now that I've had the opportunity to meet all the kids! Thank you for all you do as parents and have a wonderful weekend!
-Mrs. (Jenny) Whitehair