September 9th - 12th

The students love going outdoors.  Each day we have an organized gross motor activity as well as allowing them to choose where and how they want to play.  Jumping with two feet, running around chasing our friends, riding bikes (with our helmets), or building with our wooden blocks; Pre K students learn how to play in an environment that gives them the opportunity to make a choice on where or what to play as well as how they want to play.

During small group this week, Miss Scooter helped to lead the students in an activity of writing their name and then measuring how tall they were.  Learning what a ruler is for while also looking at the numbers was a great Math lesson as well as learning the proper letter sizes of their name.  This year in Pre K, students will concentrate on understanding how to write their name with the capital letter and lower case letters with proper sizes.  Working in small groups gives each of them the opportunity for more attention as well as learning from each other.

Miss Shelly also led a lesson to work with fine motor skills.  Tracing their name with their finger then using glue sticks to place small shapes (ovals and circles) within the letter shows them more name recognition as well.  Working to improve our fine motor skills through these style of activities will also encourage greater

Making ice cream was one of the favorite activities this week as well!  Putting all the ingredients into a bag and then shaking it up.  Great science discussion as we used words to describe liquid, hot, cold, solids, and many more.

Continuing our letter learning, we use our bingo dotting sheets for each letter to continue to allow our students to learn and see letters in fun projects.  The hand eye coordination it takes to put the bingo dot onto the circle is a great practice too!  And of course, writing their name on their own paper is helping each of them perfect those letters!

Using technology to build letter recognition and understand how to write is a great combination!  Here our students form their letters by drawing over stars.  Then once complete we ask them to say the sound of each letter connecting their growth even further.

This week in the writing center students were encouraged to use our name box and write the names of some of their friends.  They look forward to getting a special sticker when they were done.  Practicing writing in any form strengthens their pencil holding, letter formation, and name recognition of their friends too.

Pre K students LOVE using our pointy fingers and magnifying glasses to search the room for our weekly letters.  Being able to connect and find as many as they can gives them a sense of pride and accomplishment when we rejoice with them as they show us every one they find!

In Science one of our students favorite activities is the play doh.  Using our pie mats to roll out "fruit" for a pie helps them to strengthen fine motor skills and learn new tasks that they are not used to doing.  Their imagination and thought to accomplish these new tasks is a joy to watch!

Reminder this coming Friday is National talk like a pirate day.  Come dressed for a great day matey!

Scholastic book orders are due by Wednesday, September 17th.  You can order online at Scholastic Website using our classroom code:  NF6ZF