Hi Mom,
We have had such a great time learning about the Helpers in our community! We finished out the Community Helpers Unit in preschool by doing activities about Police Officers, Doctors & Nurses and Mail Carriers. You can find all the printables for the rest of the Unit as follows:
Police Officer printables
here
Doctor printables
here
Mail Carrier printables
here
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| Fingerprinting our counting books |
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| Reading the Street Sign Shapes book |
On Tuesday, we became officers and made cool hats and badges for ourselves and called each other "Officer ________" all day long. Our story of the day was
Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathmann- which we all loved! Gloria is a very entertaining police dog...and we all learned that life is always better (and safer!) with good friends. In addition to talking about the duties of a police officer, we made a Policeman Lap Book that had a counting fingerprints book (which had OUR fingerprints in it!), a street sign shapes book (we keep talking about the shapes of the signs that we've seen now) and a 3D stoplight. We practiced our street address and phone numbers, both of which are found in our Lap Books as well, and Ms. Marianne offered us a special prize if we could recite our address and phone number to her. She taught her daughters a song to remember the numbers of her phone number and they sing it all the time! One important thing that we discussed when we learned about police officers is that it's OK to talk to them, even though technically they're strangers to us. We should be comfortable going to them if we need help, because they are our protectors!
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| Honorary Officers! |
As a part of our Community Helpers Unit, we had an exciting visit from a Registered Nurse who showed us all kinds of neat things from her tool kit that she uses on a daily basis. Nurse Mary took our temperature and our blood pressure, showed us a Butterfly Needle for drawing blood (we didn't get to handle this tool though!), opened up some bandages, let us listen to our hearts and hers, and talked about some of the things she gets to do as a nurse every day, like assisting doctors and making her patients more comfortable. We put on our special "doctor masks" and latex gloves and made a Doctor
kit that we can use to help our own patients, complete with bandages, tongue depressors and cotton swabs. :) Now we're ready to go!
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| Doctor Kit construction |
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| Our hearts beat fast! |
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| Nurse Mary showed us how her stethoscope works. |
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| all of us were the perfect temperature (or close!) |
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| Her blood pressure cuff- it squeezes your arm! |
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| the Butterfly needle retracts into the butterfly part to prevent the nurses from getting stuck |
We learned a new song: My Doctor Helps Me (to the tune of Old MacDonald)- found in our resources link above- and read
Froggy Goes to the Doctor by Jonathan London. Froggy is so silly! And I know the doctor's office is nothing to be scared of, especially now that I know so much about the tools that doctors and nurses use to help keep me well.
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| French Fry Math |
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| Shaving Cream writing |
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| Pill bottle ordering by size |
These past few weeks, we've been working hard on counting. Almost all of us can count confidently to 50 now (or we're really close!) We've been practicing using our fingers, adding an additional finger each time we get to a ten number. So one finger at 10, two fingers at 20, etc until we reach 50. It seems to help with turnover because we can look at our fingers and think about what tens place number is coming next. We also practiced number writing with shaving cream writing time and simple subtraction by playing a fun game called French Fry Subtraction where we got to pretend to "eat" French fries from a paper container as we set up a subtraction problem. We loved the act of noshing on the fries while we wrote out the number sentence. We also worked on sorting and ordering by size by cutting out, lining up and gluing paper prescription bottles in order from largest to smallest.
Fun fact: one day this week was National Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Day, so we celebrated with a special lunch / snack that day!
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| Peanut Butter-Jelly Time! |
Our final Community Helper that we studied and experienced during this Unit was the Mail Carrier. They have an important job! We practiced writing our names and addresses on envelopes and putting them into our preschool mailbox. Then we wrote REAL cards and addressed them to someone who we love and walked them down to the mailboxes in Ms. Marianne's neighborhood. We also wrote thank you notes to all the community helpers that we have been to visit during the last few weeks, like the dentist, the firefighters and we even made a special card just for the mail carrier!
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| checking the preschool mailbox for mail! |
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| We have mail! |
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| "How do you spell that word?" :) yay for thinking it out! |
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| Addressing our REAL mail envelopes |
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| Getting the mail ready to send |
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| Practicing putting the mail into the box and lifting the flag |
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| Off to the REAL mailbox! |
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| We're ready for the mail carrier to take our mail and get it to our loved ones. |
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| In it goes! |
Next week, we will practice more with identifying and describing shapes in the world around us. We will also practice some of our skills that we've learned- especially our numbers, letters & sounds, and counting.
Love,
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne
