Start to Preschool 2018

Welcome back to Pirate Pete Preschool!
We had an amazing start to the school year with everyone falling into the routines of school very easily.  We work very hard to provide consistent structure to our day and that structure helps the children from past years adapt again soon and helps the new children fall into routine right away.

Our day starts at the circle rug with the welcome song and days of the week song then we work on our today board talking about the season, month, year, date, weather and more.  The children have all done a terrific job learning these songs and are catching on to the month of September and year of 2018.

We started off the week with some activities about one another where the teachers were able to ask the preschoolers questions about themselves and the teachers helped the children write down their answers. 
 We currently have these hanging up in our room so the teachers can read a bit about the children in their downtime.The teachers have also been very busy during free play time getting to know all the children as well; learning what they like to play and information about their families and interests.

On Monday we worked on a class math graph about our favorite colors.  Each child was given a sticker and brought their sticker up to the board to place their vote in the part of the graph where their favorite color was located.  Then, we counted the amount of stickers in each column, wrote the number then discussed which color was the largest favorite and which one is the least favorite among the children in the class. 

We learned about our bodies this week and that bones are under our skin and we have things called a heart, lungs, and intestines and put all of these things together by using puzzles made up of X-rays, foam bones and body vests and velcro organs.  
The children rotated to each station so everyone was able to work on bones and organs throughout the day; we have a blast watching them get better and better at putting things together.

 Each day we cover a letter of the day and start the year with the beginning of the alphabet by looking at pictures and items beginning with that letter and practice the phonics then we model how to make the upper and lower case letters on our white board then anyone with a name starting with that letter comes up to draw that letter on the board and then the entire class goes to the tables to work on practicing the letter of the day on paper.  

For some preschool reading activities we also had the children find an image of the first letter of their name and then choose items to fill in that letter to help them recognize the phonics and image of the first letter so when we look for name tags each day they will have more success finding their name.  

We read a lot of books this week about, What Mommies Do Best, and, What Daddies Do Best and more.  We have been talking about families and various members of families but also about things the children can do, All By Myself.

We built houses for families to live in out of large blocks, foam blocks, and building sticks to work on our fine and gross motor development.  We use all of these materials a lot throughout the year to build various items also for STEM (engineering) related activities as well.

On Friday we worked on making mirrors in talking about the parts of our faces and the senses those parts allow us to use. Then, we sang the song, "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes," and took our mirrors back to the tables to glue down eyes, ears, a mouth and nose to the mirror to show our teachers we know where those body parts go on a face.

 This week we did some family based math and gave the children small paper people and a paper house for them to count out the people they would include in their family and glue them into the house.  We talked about each family member they selected to include then counted with the children to get a total number of people each child considers in their family.  Feel free to ask your child to identify the people they chose to put in their house, it may start some great conversations!

We reviewed images of people in a standard family, like a baby, a child, a grandpa, a grandma, a mom and a dad.  We talked about various other names people call these family members then had the children sort out the same pictures from our discussion on the screen.

After we played the matching game we worked on some fine motor skills making bracelets out of one of the teacher's favorite cereals, Cheerios!  To help our little ones who needed adaptation with threading string into the holes of the cereal we added tape to the tip of the yarn.  
If you have any string at home and any cereal with a hole in the middle you can encourage your child's small motor development with this same activity.  Working on perfecting their pincher grasp will help them hold writing utensils correctly which will in turn help them become better with their handwriting.  

 During snack time on Friday we celebrated our first birthday of the year with Scooby Snacks as we sang Happy Birthday before the Snack Song to thank our special preschooler.

Then it was back to work with another project that asked the children to identify the parts of the face as they used plates to create a face.  
Many children made themselves with their plates but some chose to create three-eyed aliens and others piled on facial features to make designs.  Remember our activities are always differentiated to suit the needs and personalities of our students, this is the best part of our program as we are able to use the massive manpower we possess to make sure each child's needs are met. 

What's Coming Up?
This coming week we will be talking about Hygiene and Safety to set the rules up for the year pertaining to hand washing, covering our coughs and blowing our noses as well as overall hygiene with relation to dental care and baths an safety both at preschool as well as home.

The following week is Homecoming at PHS so we will be sending home communication about Spirit days as soon as we are told what the school will be doing for that week.  We encourage our preschoolers to dress up with us the week of homecoming to show their school spirit!