Welcome little pirates!

We are so excited to have our little pirates back in school!  Pirate Pete Preschool has been off to a great start as we planned activities that allowed us to get to know one another better.  We practiced our Welcome and Days of the Week songs and started each day with our Today Board where we practiced the season, month, year, date, and weather.  

The children learned about some of the things the preschool has to offer during free play times and investigated some of our toys as well as science manipulatives.

We practice a different letter each day as the semester goes on starting with letter A.  We look at pictures of things that start with the letter of the day and listen to the sound the letter makes.  Then whoever has that letter in his/her name comes to the front of the room to write that letter on the white board.  Then we do letter of the day sheets at the tables to take home so everyone is able to practice the upper and lower case version of the letters.

The children who came back again this year helped their new friends learn a few songs this week too.  We love the, "Cool Bear Hunt" and had a lot of laughs pretending to run away from the bear again!

This week we read books about how special it is that we are all so different and have so much to learn about one another.  We learned about the many ways people learn and how not all of us enjoy doing the same things.  We also read a book about feelings and imitated the emotions being talked about in the book and talked about what things make us feel mad, happy, excited, and scared.

In keeping with the idea of our similarities and differences we noticed that we all have 5 fingers on our hands but some of us have hands that are bigger or smaller than our own.  We compared hand sizes and then traced our hands on paper then dipped our fingers in paint one day and in ink another to see which item helps us see our individual fingerprints better.  (The correct answer is ink.)  

We used magnify glasses to look at our fingerprints and compare them to one another to see how different they are from one another.  Feel free to keep your child's finger prints made in ink in a safe place at home.  Should you ever need to share them with police in case of emergency, you now have them on file.

Sometimes we get donations from faculty and staff, preschool families as well as members of the community and this fall one of our faculty members donated a home made puppet show box.  The children asked to play with it and decided it was better suited as a television where they could be the stars!  We had a lot of laughs as many of the children crawled in and out of the 't.v.' playing the roles of a variety of characters.

Some of our preschoolers were not interested in playing an actor on television and chose some of our small manipulative toys and games instead.  Play doh has been a very popular free play item for the children as well as our block area, the noodle buckets and magnet bins.

When we went back to work, we did a lot of projects that allowed the teachers to get to know the preschoolers.  We asked the children a variety of questions and wrote down their answers after the children made a self-portrait on the other side.  We also made books where the children 'read' pictures in order to choose a favorite food, animal and hair color.  The children also showed us their favorite color or colors by filling in a circle with one or more colors.  They read the books to a variety of teachers when they were complete and we hope they read them to you as well.

We talked about the parts of the body and what things we wear on which part.  We let each child draw themselves and then hung their drawings in our classroom.  It's nice to see our preschoolers in the room even when they aren't there!

The children are all adjusting well to the routines of the day and we look forward to seeing them again next week as we move into circus week!

Remember that while we have our weekly blog posts on Sundays, we also post pictures of our times together on Instagram almost daily.  Please feel free to follow us and check in on our activities through photos and video clips during the week!

What's Coming Up?

Don't forget there is no preschool on Monday, September 5th.  We will see you on Wednesday for circus week!