Welcome to the start of a new year!

We had a terrific first week of preschool!  On our first day, we reviewed the Welcome and Days of the Weeks songs and identified and discussed various classroom objects that we will be using this year like the Today Board where we talk about the day, the week, the month and the year along with the season and weather.  

We had a lot of fun guessing what the objects were based on a zoomed-in picture of each one!  

We learned about the parts of the preschool room today and rotated stations on Mrs. Stary's command.  The kitchen was crowded because cooking for the teachers was an exciting challenge!  Some preschoolers enjoy creating their own food creations out of our Play-Doh as well (pizza is the class favorite). While at the train table, we learned about different automobiles and traffic patterns, others chose to take a quiet moment to read with their teachers.

The block center is a great way for us to use our imaginations!  We love building tall towers and elaborate castles but knocking our own creations down is one of our favorite parts! 

There are so many options in the preschool room!  The sensory table always has interesting objects to feel and measure.  The tool and costume stations allow us to be anything that we want to be!  From a skillful builder, to a beautiful princess, or even a dangerous dragon!

Every preschool day, there is a letter of the day. For the first day of school, the letter was A. After a series of pictures that start with the letter are shown, a teacher will demonstrate how to make a capital A and a lower case a.  Then, we practice making the sounds and anyone with an A in their name gets to make the letter of the day on the board before we all go to the tables to practice individually too. 

We heard a few stories this week about school and all the types of people who go to school and how it makes them feel.  It brought up good discussions about how we should behave at school as well as how we might feel as we go through the course of our school day.

One activity we did on the first day of school was play with a parachute. The kids loved to make waves and bounce bean bags off the parachute. It definitely put a smile on everyone's face and gave us all a good upper body work out too.  People often think they can't do the parachute at home but if you have a sheet, you most certainly can!  Head outside with a sheet and a few pairs of bundled socks and you can re-create our classroom activity at home!

We learned about our fingerprints and discussed how each every one of us is different as we had each child place every finger on an ink pad then press their finger prints on to a hand.  We then used magnify glasses to view how each finger print looked different from all the rest in the room.

After discussing and analyzing our finger prints, we came to the conclusion each of us has many talents. Some of us are good at soccer, some are good at hula hooping, and some are good at balancing on a beam! 

After talking about what makes us all different this week, we also talked about the different families we come from and decided to show off who lives in our homes.  We noticed while some people live with one parent, others have grandparents in their homes and many have babies.  

We then made pennants out of things that represent us, like various toys, sports and included Pirate Pete for our school spirit!  Each preschooler had the choice of which items they wanted to cut out and glue to their pennant to hang up at home.

We also studied our letters and matched upper and lower case letters together and spelled out words related to school with the teachers.  We drew pictures of our families and explained all the images we drew before placing them in our cubbies to move on to the last activity of the week.

To close out the week of learned about one another and understand we have some similarities and some differences, we talked about apples.  We discussed the many varieties of color and taste then asked the children to color their own sun catcher apple in whatever colors they enjoy eating.  Some children chose red, others green and a few yellow.  We also had some technicolored apples with all three colors used.  Hang these up in the window at home to enjoy this fall apple season!

As the year continues, we really hope that every week can bring fun and exciting experiences that will help us learn and grow!  

What's Coming Up?

• This coming week, we will be using children's movies and television shows as a way to make learning fun!  Look for classic characters to be used to work one pre-reading and math concepts!

• Monday, September 28 there will be no preschool, it will be a two day week due to a change in the high school schedule.

*Thanks to our Program interns (Emily, Rachel & Shannon) for working on this week's blog post!