We LOVE Preschool!

Well, one week down, many more to go!  

We have had quite the beginning to the Spring 2014 semester. Our first day of preschool was wonderful and our new preschoolers did a terrific job adjusting to the new routines. We have already had 2 birthdays in the AM session and talked about how much we love our family and friends as we prepared for Valentine's Day and practiced our safety procedures a bit earlier than planned.

The first day of school was filled with learning and remembering all our routines of school. We start each day with the "Welcome Song," (many kids in the AM session call it the Good Morning Song).  After we sing the Welcome Song, we are reminded by our veteran preschoolers to sing the Days of the Week Song and then we work on the Today Board. Each day we talk about the season, the month, the year, the date, the weather and what our buddy Pirate Pete should wear for the day to keep warm. 

After this, we look at visual clues to guess what we might be doing and talking about for the day. The teachers in each period create these visual clues based on their lessons and activities for the day. 

Now that we will be having two sessions of preschool, you will see pictures from both sessions so everyone can have a chance to see what is going on throughout our time together at Pirate Pete Preschool. 

This week, we brought the cold snow indoors for science and had the preschoolers built snow hearts with cookie cutters since it has been way too cold outside to enjoy a lot of the terrific snow we see as we enter school. 

Each day when the goodbye teachers come to see the preschoolers, they start their time with the children doing letter of the day.  Again, using visual cues, the preschoolers will see pictures that all start with the same letter. As they look at the pictures and we practice the sounds, the preschoolers then guess what the letter of the day will be. 
Then, anyone who has that letter at the start of their name gets to come up to the white board and draw it with their teacher. After this, all of the preschoolers go to the tables to practice writing the letter of the day.  
I made this game for my daughter (a four-year-old) to practice associating sounds with the letters of the alphabet.  It is similar to what we do with the preschoolers for letter of the day so feel free to try it at home with your kids too.

In order to get some of our wiggles out, we went into the main hallway to play a Valentine heart twister game. 

We also had various hearts of different colors in the hall and the preschoolers had to find the color that coordinated with the one they were assigned (blue with blue, green with green, etc.)  Both of these kinds of games are fun ways to allow for large motor activities when we can't get outside the way we would like to this time of year.

We played various math games that evolved sorting (not eating) those terrific candy hearts that are so popular this time of year. The preschoolers did a great job sorting the hearts by color and then also sorting by amounts and deciding which colors had the most and which color appeared the least. 

Those little candy hearts came in handy as well for many science experiments. Did you know the orange ones seem to float more than any other color?  Ah the discoveries we make!  To try this at home, check out how we did the experiment here.  

We made MANY projects for this Valentine season for our refrigerators and walls at home to share with our loved ones.  The children were able to decorate their treasure bags we will use to collect Valentines on Wednesday when preschool resumes. (We call them treasure bags so they can keep anything they would like inside them once they get home.)  The Valentine exchange will be the first thing we do when the kids arrive at school after our Welcome Song and Today Board activities are complete.   I know they are looking forward to it. 

Besides all of our crafts, counting and experimenting, we heard many stories, books, enjoyed free play and getting to know each other.  We did some early reading activities where the children had to find their name written on a heart and bring it to the teacher, we played tea party and had a terrific first week!

On a separate note, our safety unit is not for a few weeks but the morning crew practiced our procedures for lock downs on Friday. I must say the children were amazing and our system worked wonderfully to keep everyone safe. I know when it comes time to practice our drills for fire, tornadoes and lock downs during safety week, our preschoolers will be able to explain to us what to do and how to stay safe at school. These procedures will vary from building to building but as they move on to kindergarten but they will have the background knowledge of what these drills mean and how to do them. 

What's Coming Up?

Please remember while we don't have school today for President's Day, we also have no school on Friday this week due to Palatine High School hosting the State Gymnastics Meet so while we won't hold preschool, come to PHS and check it out!

All preschool parents have gotten a school calendar for the semester sent home but remember you can always check the blog and click the What's Coming Up link to sync your Google Calendar with ours.

We will be starting up our Star of the Week again next week so look for those posters to come home with your child when it is his or her turn to work on one.  

Wednesday we will do a Valentine Exchange since we were not able to do it on Valentine's Day last week.