Thankful Pirates

As we move into Thanksgiving Break we are reminded of how grateful we are for the Pirate Pete Preschool program, the fabulous community we serve, the little pirates we learn from and the high school students who choose to work with the future of our town.  Through all the Turkey hops games, stuffing relays and pumpkin pie math we had the underlying theme this week of gratitude.

We are grateful to learn about a big boat called the Mayflower and learned how to make our own boats using paper cups, play dough and a popsicle stick with a paper triangle called a sail.  We "cooked" pumpkins by melting down baking soda pumpkins with vinegar and enjoyed a lot of role playing in our kitchen area where the children served and shared a pretend Thanksgiving Day Meal with one another.

Hopefully as you all enjoy this coming week off for the Thanksgiving Holiday you will see your preschooler acting as the Manners Police at the table.  We worked on saying please and thank you when requesting and passing food items and encouraged people to keep their elbows off the table during some of our pretend meals.  The children had to monitor the silly teachers who needed to learn better manners from the little pirate manners police and lots of laughs were had as we tried to see what we could get away with at dinner. 

Once we had the turkey all stuffed we thought we would get a little messy with making fall colored slime out of glue and shaving cream and mixing colors to make orange.  Everyone loves slime so feel free to google one of the many recipes while you are home this week and whip some up for some small motor fun!

Hopefully most of the Thanksgiving projects made their way home this week though some might have still been wet when it was time to go home.  We learned a lot this week about the things the children are thankful for and tried to use pre-reading and pre-writing skills to recognize the words that represent the pictures and items and people we talked about this week through large and small group discussions as well as books and stories about family, friends and Thanksgiving itself.  

This spring we will be working on making adjustments to the family communications between preschool and parents.  Please take a couple of minutes and complete this survey for us to give us your opinion about our blog and moving towards newer forms of communication like Bloomz or Class Dojo. 

Next school year will be here before we know it and we are looking into beginning a new method of communication by using one of these two apps next year in place of the weekly blog posts.  The preschool blog would not go away entirely, we would just use it less frequently and it would focus more on how to teach various curricular areas to children and be taken over more so by students.

However, if families would like to keep the blog in it's current state we will cease our plans to make the move to an app as the regular way to share photos and materials for preschool.  We want to come up with the best way to work together as a team and would appreciate your feedback prior to making our final decision.  NO CHANGES would happen this year, we are just working to figure out what our plan will be moving forward.  

• What's Coming Up?

• Enjoy your time with family this week and we will see you December 2nd for winter week!
  
• Don't forget the last day of preschool for this semester is Friday, December 13th.  We will have our holiday party that day; details to follow after break!

Knights and cowboys and pirates, oh my!

This week we focused on the power of imagination and dramatic play.  We spent time in medieval lands with knights and dragons and traveled to the wild west to roam the range as cowboys and cowgirls.  We finished off the week as pirates on the high seas in true Palatine fashion.

Dramatic play is crucial to all human growth and development as it shares a child's view of the world but also promotes creativity.  As a part of the Pirate Pete Preschool curriculum we support and encourage both free play and dramatic play each week in our planning.  Dramatic play helps teach through role play either while acting the role of knights who save the day or ranchers herding cattle or Pirates sailing a ship.  One of the best ways to teach about something is to act it out and this form of learning was a huge part of this week. 

Some times this week we worked on building our large motor connections in our bodies by lassoing cattle on the range, collecting balloon sheep and walking the plank and learning the Pirate Loyalty cheer but we worked on small motor muscles too.  

Some of our small motor activities happened when we added feathers to pirate parrots and sorted through dragon slime, built pirate flags, and hunted for gold in sand.  All of these activities are consistently supported by the dramatic play and storylines of the day.

STEM work allows us to build things using creativity and the ability we all have to think outside the box.  We learned about armor and the children worked to decorate and build armor out of paper towel and toilet paper rolls and built castles out of sticks and marshmallows.  During that time we also had students build knights out of those sticks and marshmallows.  The catapults and cannons we built this week helped teach cause and effect as the children learned how to adjust them to shoot pom pons higher and further across the room.

The stories we read this week and the songs we sang supported our dramatic play activities and our art projects of creating shields and helmets of armor as well as treasure chests filled with mysterious letters and numbers.

Please continue to work on recognizing letters and numbers within your home and when you are out and about.  Read the menu at a restaurant and the numbers on the microwave.  The more you ask the children to recognize the M in McDonald's and the number 4 to match their age the more confident they will become in reading but also the easier things will get for them as they learn to read.  Letter recognition is the first step to reading and children are expected to read by kindergarten.

What's Coming Up?

• This coming week we will be talking about Thanksgiving and the season of fall.  
• Remember we will not have preschool the last week of November (the 25th - 29th); please have a fabulous Thanksgiving Holiday.
• Please ensure you have either paid for spring preschool or made arrangements for payment with Kris Stary prior to Friday, November 22nd.