Family & Friends

This week we loved hearing about friends and family both in our Star of the Week presentations as well as our stories and activities all based around this theme.

We sorted out pictures of family members and found pictures of babies, children, parents, grandparents and even pets!  Then, we arranged them to represent those in our families.

This week we also learned the concept of a family tree and how the leaves and branches represent different parts of the family.  Then we made trees to begin learning this concept.  Throughout other lessons this week we talked more about family trees and began to get more specific about who we each have in our trees.

We discussed things we like to do with our families like cook, build things and dance and play together.  Then we rotated stations to do these activities with our friends!

Since we talked about cooking with family we prepared a paper meal complete with a salad for dinner and cookies for dessert.  The children explained the decorations of frosting and salad ingredients they included in their meal assembly.

We worked together with our friends to search for animal families in our bins using clothes pins to improve our fine motor muscles.  A lot of our preschoolers are going on to kindergarten next year and still need a lot of work on building up these muscles to help improve how they hold their writing utensils thus improving the quality of their writing and cutting in kindergarten (all of which will not be helped one on one at that age level). 

Please continue to support these students at home with small motor toys and games like legos, play-doh and using scissors on a more regular basis.

As stated before we talked a lot about the concept of family trees and made a variety of projects around this concept, we also created paper people to represent family members both in and out of our homes.

We worked on our spacial awareness this week as we drew maps of how to get from home to school and back again.  Some children added houses, trees, stop signs and buildings to their maps to help show us the way to their home.

Then we moved on to reading words associated with family by matching post its with words like sister, dad, mom, etc. with larger words of the same.  By playing this matching game we were able to help them look for letters or whole words depending on their reading ability at this point.  Remember that the expectation for kindergarten is that children know how to identify all capitol and lower case letters, their phonics and how to read some words.  This activity supports all of these expectations.

Before we headed home we watched some science experiments all about the emotions our family and friends bring out in us, the balloon raising happiness we can feel as well as the volcano anger and the blue tears of sadness.  We discussed times when we felt all of these emotions as we performed the experiments for the children at closing circle.

What's Coming Up?

• Next week we have preschool on Monday and Wednesday and a non attendance day Friday so school will NOT be in session Friday, April 19th.
  
• We will be talking about safety next week with special guests from the police and fire departments (given no emergencies require their assistance.)
  
• There will be no preschool Friday, April 26th due to a change in the high school schedule.
  
• We are still looking to fill spots in our afternoon preschool session next year. Please direct any interested parties to the Preschool website.