Books, books, books!

Oh what amazing things we did this week!  We read book after book by Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle and Mo Willems.  Each day we took a different author and highlighted various terms like the word, 'author', and helped the children understand this career.  We hope that now of you ask the children about authors or what job is about writing books they will be able to give you a bit of an explanation.  Dr. Seuss went first this week since his birthday was Monday.

Besides reading a lot of his books on Monday, we made a few projects, worked on some science experiments and played a few games all related to his books.  We sorted fish in fish bowls to match, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and expanded The Grinch's heart, made Oobleck, and patterned Cat in the Hat hats out of the letters in our names, all before compiling a Truffula Tree forrest for The Lorax then bounced 'truffula pom pons out of the parachute forrest!

Wednesday we talked about Eric Carle and his famous Very Hungry Caterpillar as we fed him letters of the alphabet on our white board for some early reading practice.  We listened for the Very Quiet Cricket and played a game From Head to Toe all about how we can move our bodies!  One of our small group reading stations was about 10 Rubber Ducks which inspired us to make our own paper plate ducklings for art time.

We wanted to take this week's theme as an opportunity for you to learn more about the importance of reading for your children.  It is usually recommended for children to read about 20 minutes a day which means that if your child is not already reading out loud (as it is normal for preschoolers not to be reading yet so don't worry) YOU should be the one reading to your child 20 minutes a day.  
This might seem like a lot but there are so many benefits to reading to young children that even from infancy and toddler years this is an enormous benefit to your child.  We know how busy everyone is each day but if reading a book or two or five before bed becomes a part of the daily routine your child will be better for it!

We ended our week with Mo Willems' Elephant and Piggie books which are a more recent trend in early childhood literature.  While we adults have grown up with Eric Carle and Dr. Seuss these new books by Willems are making reading silly and entertaining while helping those children close to reading on their own see more small successes in their interest in putting letters into words and words into sentences.

We have a lot of preschoolers moving on to Kindergarten next year and hope their families encourage reading at home (as we hope ALL of our families encourage reading at home.) We also know that sometimes we can get stuck in a rut of the same books over and over again so here are a couple of resources for you.  This is just one example of a Top 100 List from Time of the best children's books.  

Maybe seeing some of your old favorites will inspire you to get them for your home.  And speaking of getting books for your home, don't forget about the AMAZING opportunities your public library has to offer. No matter where you live there is a public library you can visit and visiting ANY library is FREE just like checking out books with your library card is free too, so why not try to gather some books that way as well!

What's Coming Up?

• This coming week we will be talking about what we want to do when we grow up.
• Also this week you might want to check out the PHS Choir Concert on Thursday or the Honors Band Concert on Saturday. 
• Remember that we have spring break coming up the week of March 22nd so there will be no school that entire week.  Hope this great weather holds up for us to enjoy outside play time!
• We are officially full for the 2020-2021 school year!