Merry Christmas!

Hi Mom,

This week in preschool we talked all about Christmas. We read "The Night Before Christmas" (the traditional poem) and "Five Little Ornaments" (a poem to teach subtraction, one by one). We also read one of Ms. Marianne's very favorite Christmas books called Merry Un-Christmas. It's a hilarious book about what life would be like if Christmas was every day. The people in this book celebrate Un-Christmas and are excited about things like turning off the Christmas lights, getting rid of the Christmas tree, going to school (the only day it's open a year!), seeing the mailman (who is their jolly fat man with a huge sack on his back) and even deciding what to eat for Un-Christmas dinner (TV dinners!). At the end, the little girl says she wishes it could be Christmas everyday, and her mom says "Oh, I bet you'd get tired of it after awhile." Don't we all feel that way sometimes about Christmas? I know I wish I could feel this good all year! This book is non-traditional, but it reminds us in a fun way that each day is special.

We chatted about what we love most about Christmas time: presents (of course!) and family time topped the list. Playing in the snow was also brought up and we all love to do that too! Each of us is really excited about this holiday coming up. Each day this month we've been counting down the days until it's here. This is getting us much more comfortable with the calendar and how it works, especially how days, weeks and months relate to each other.

Since winter begins on Saturday, December 21, our letter of the week was Ww. Ms. Marianne promised a sticker to anyone who could come up with a /w/ word on their own throughout the week- she gave out a lot of stickers and our Ww wall was covered in /w/ words! We are so creative in our class! Winter, wall, water, want, we, write and whale were just a few of our words this week. One of the fun things we noticed about Ww is that it's the opposite of Mm in that Ww "holds water" while Mm "makes a mountain". It was a little tricky for some of us to differentiate between the two letters because they are so similar (only upside down from each other!) but we practiced our letters a lot this week to help us cement them in our heads, especially since we've got a break coming up next week. One way that we practiced was by playing Letter and Sound BINGO. We had fun listening to and finding the letters from our "Letters we Know" Wall on our BINGO boards. It also let Ms. Marianne see which letters we're still struggling with so that she can help us on those specifically.

Did you open my Christmas gift to you yet?? I worked so hard on it! Ms. Marianne helped a little in gluing my picture into the frame and hot gluing the magnets on, but I had a lot of fun putting the rest together myself. I hope you like it! We can hook an ornament holder onto it and put it on the Christmas tree too, if you want. That way we can enjoy it every Christmas. :)

Oh, and did you get to see my gift from Ms. Marianne? She took the class book that we illustrated and extended (Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?) and had it copied and bound for each of us to take home and read over and over again. :) We really did a great job on it and I'm excited to have it at home now too!

To increase our fine motor skills (and to create some really cool art) we tore red pieces of construction paper out and made a candy cane with an AB pattern of red-white-red on it. Yay for practicing many skills in one project!

 My favorite activity this week was building my gingerbread house. I used everything that Ms. Marianne put out for us! Many of us had so much candy on our houses they almost fell down. I couldn't wait to eat mine. :) This activity tied in with the Gingerbread Baby book that we read last week and finished up our Gingerbread unit. My house had lots of candy for my gingerbread man to enjoy, just like Matti's did for the Gingerbread Baby when he chose to live there. This was a fun unit of study!

 

Did I show you my finger puppets that we made for our Five Little Ornaments poem? We practiced and practiced showing five through one on our fingers (tricky for little hands!) as we recited the poem and counted down to zero with the puppets. We will continue to use our hands to count one through five and also ten to increase fine motor skills and improve our counting too! And speaking of counting to five, we also began learning to count BY fives to one hundred. We've gotten counting by tens down, and we'll continue to use that and practice the "turnover" (29-30; 49-50; 99-100, etc.) by counting to ten on our fingers as we count to one hundred. Practice makes perfect!

A quick note from Ms. Marianne: Remember that the next two weeks are a vacation from school. Preschool will resume Tuesday, January 7th, 2014, with tuition and our new semester supply fee ($45) due that day. :)

Can you believe we're already halfway through our year?!? This next semester will hold some really fun units like Ocean, Community Helpers (including some not so common helpers!), Dinosaurs, Farm, and even Pirates! We're also going to have some neat field trips that I'm already looking forward to. I can't wait!


Love,
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne

Run, Run, As Fast As You Can...

Hi Mom!
Things were sweet in preschool this week. Our theme was Gingerbread! We read about, made and ate this yummy treat.

We studied the elements of a story: Title/ author/ illustrator; Characters: Plot: Setting: Problem & Solution. Our books were: Maisy Makes Gingerbread by Lucy Cousins, The Gingerbread Man, (a classic fairy tale) The Gingerbread Girl by Lisa Campbell Ernst and Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. Throughout each story, we discussed each of these elements and used our best comprehension skills to predict what would happen next. It was so fun to read all the stories and find all their differences and similarities- especially on the Gingerbread character stories! The endings of each of the three Gingerbread Character stories were very different, and sometimes our predictions were pretty off :) but we discussed what happened and who was right in what they predicted and then compared the endings to the other stories that we'd read.

After reading Maisy Makes Gingerbread, we took to the kitchen with aprons on and made our own gingerbread dough, using a recipe. We measured and mixed and it came together beautifully! On the next day, after reading The Gingerbread Man story, we rolled out the dough and used cutters to cut the dough into gingerbread men, which we decorated with raisins. Once they were ready to bake, we warned them that they'd better not run away! Then we put them into the oven and watched them bake. They got all puffy as they baked, and we became anxious that they'd run away when we opened the door. Ms. Marianne cracked it a little and we heard a voice say "Let me out!". We were so surprised! After laughing because each time she'd open the door we'd hear it again, Ms. Marianne helped us to count down from 10 to 0 and then she quickly opened the oven door and pulled the pan of gingerbread men out. She promised us that if she worked fast enough, they'd stay put on the pan to cool. So she moved really fast! After they'd cooled enough, we got to eat our gingerbread men. :) yum yum! We thought it was great fun to say what body part we were going to bite off next. Our favorite seemed to be the top of the gingerbread's head- after which we'd show off its "brains" inside. hahaha!

 

  We also did a great science experiment where we asked "What would happen if the Gingerbread Man had fallen into the water?" We discussed the Scientific Method and went through all the steps to finish our experiment. We created a hypothesis (we thought it would float!); tested our hypothesis & gathered data through the experiment (putting the gingerbread into the water dish and watching what happened) and then analyzed our data to come to a conclusion. Our conclusion was that if the Gingerbread Man had fallen into the water and gotten wet, he would have sunk to the bottom of the water, become soggy and fallen apart! We loved this experiment- especially being able to poke at the poor gingerbread we put into the water dish. :)

  Since the stories we read were all about Gingerbread running away and not being caught, we practiced "catching" gingerbread in an activity where we reviewed our letter names and sounds and then focused on segmentation, blending and beginning sounds of words. Ms. Marianne is so pleased with our progress! She was excited at how well we were able to hear the beginning sounds of the CVC (consonant / vowel / consonant) words she segmented with us. We each kept as many as we could properly identify, otherwise they got away and we had to try again. One of us caught 7 gingerbread! Wow!

 

Our letter of the week was (you guessed it!) Gg. It was a little tricky because the /g/ sound we learned was not the first sound in gingerbread, our weekly theme! We acted out the /g/ sound by being gorillas pounding our chests as we said "/g/, /g/, /g/!" This, of course, was great fun and silliness and caused loads of laughter, every time we practiced it! We each also got a chance to work with Ms. Marianne in tracing the capital G and lowercase g, both of which are trickier letters than most. Worksheets also helped us practice listening for the /g/ sound at the beginning of the names of pictures and also writing the letter itself. We also did an activity sheet where we had 3 letter choices for the beginning sound of a picture's name, and we acted as detectives who had to figure out which letter was at the beginning. Ms. Marianne kept this paper for our portfolios so we could see again and again how well we're doing. It's neat to be in our classroom and hearing everyone saying the names over and over again, emphasizing the beginning sound. It's a little noisy, but so awesome to listen to and realize that we're all really beginning to 'get' it!

This week held our 50th day of preschool. Can you believe we're there already?!? We worked really hard on counting by tens this week in preschool. We are learning to mark the tens on our fingers as we count to 100. It's a little confusing because we think we're counting to ten, not by tens on our fingers, but we're beginning to understand and get it right! Place value is a very important skill to master, and we're working hard on it!

Next week is our last week of school for 2013. We've been singing a new song every day during Calendar Time that helps us learn the names of the Months of the Year. It's going to be interesting to see how we handle the turnover of the new year! We're so set in saying the date ending in "2013" and now we're going to have to learn 2014 :) We've also been using our detective skills to find the letters we've learned in the names of the 12 months.

We'll continue with a few more gingerbread activities and incorporate some Christmas themed arts and crafts and stories next week. Our letter will be Ww, because Winter is starting on Saturday, December 21, the first day of our two week Winter Break! Remember to mark our calendar, because school resumes Tuesday,  January 7, 2014!

Love,
Your Child

and

Ms. Marianne

Umbrellas, Ugly Ducklings & Stolen Cookies!

Dear Mom,
The star letter this week was Uu. We practiced writing it, brainstormed words that start with it, talked about the different sounds it makes and more! We acted out some of our words like up, upside down and under. (so fun!).








To continue our discussion of directionality (up, down, over, under, etc.) we headed outside for an Up and Down Scavenger Hunt. We walked to the community park and as we walked, we searched for things that were up high and down low and drew them respectively on our sheets clipped to our clipboards. We are a very observant bunch... we spied flowers and broken balloons, cacti and water down low. We also spied Christmas Ornaments hung from neighborhood trees, clouds in the sky and tree branches up high.













This week's art project was a Uu umbrella. We cut out an umbrella top from our choice of colored paper, then cut out and glued a handle on it. Ms. Marianne cut out some raindrops and we wrote 'u' on each one and either glued them to the top of the umbrella or hole punched and strung them from the umbrella top. So many skills were practiced in this project! Hand eye coordination, threading, cutting & gluing, grasping (for hold punching) and handwriting. Not to mention we had fun doing it! Our final products are hanging in our classroom now.

One story we read this week was The Ugly Duckling, a classic fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson about staying true to yourself and growing into something beautiful, no matter what we have to endure throughout life. We also talked about how it hurts when other treat us badly, and how we can hurt others when we treat them badly. Another thought that was mentioned was that we shouldn't judge what we see of others on the outside, because we can all become something beautiful if we keep trying to let our beauty out.

Another story we read was Who Stole the Cookies? by Judith Moffat- a mystery story where many friends are "accused" and then help the group to follow the clues to find the real thief. We turned this into an activity that we could all participate in and practice our rhythm too! Keeping a steady beat, we chanted:
Kids: (Name of thief) stole the cookies from the cookie jar!
Thief: Who ME?
Kids: Yes you!
Thief: It couldn't be!
Kids: Theeeeeeen WHO?
(The thief then names someone else from the group as thief, and the chant begins again)

It was funny how some of the kids were absolutely indignant and vehemently refused that they'd stolen any cookies! Ms. Marianne had to explain again and again that it was just for fun. By the end, we were all enjoying the fun. :) Eventually, Ms. Marianne confessed that she'd stolen the cookies and she brought them out for a part of our snack that day. Yuuum!

 Next Monday, we'll be making up our missed day from this week. Our theme next week is Gingerbread. In two weeks, on Thursday, December 19, we need to wear clothes that can get a little messy, as we'll be making some fun things to go along with our Gingerbread unit. :) If you have any white frosting you'd like to get rid of, Ms. Marianne would love to take it off your hands for us to use as edible glue! We're going to have so much fun!

Love,
Your Child

and

Ms. Marianne