Mrs. Rachel's Three's Class: P is for Pets!

Pet week was so much fun! We always try to pack as much fun and learning into two short days as we can!

We enjoyed lots of pet books this week, including Ten Little Puppies (with which we practiced counting down), Which Pet? (which allowed us to discuss what foods different pets need to eat), and Cat and Dog (a great book about helping our friends). Our letter focus this week was letter P.... As we practiced the letter, we "patted" our cheeks with our "paws". We also talked about words that begin with P (pets, puppies, paws, popcorn). We continued to use our shape song to learn our shapes and continued to work on identifying the numbers 1 and 2.

We enjoyed making our very own pet rock this week. Make sure to find your child's if they are still hiding in the bottom of their school bag! We made info sheets about these pets that went in their portfolios... Some were quite hilarious! We also enjoyed making puppy ears to wear around on Friday. This was a great way to practice counting and also talk about circles!

Everyone is doing such a great job with our stations and table trading! One of the skills we worked on this week was sorting, and everyone did such a great job! We have lots of sorting experts in our class. We sorted dog bones by color and sorted toy animals (into pets, farm, wild, and ocean). We also worked on counting one-to-one with dog bones by feeding our "dog" and on lacing (an important fine motor skill) by lacing princesses and princes (for the letter P) and cat whiskers onto cats.

We did our first coloring and tracing samples this week. These will be done monthly to show progress throughout the school year and will be placed in your child's portfolio. Tracing is an important pre-writing skill and one that we will work on each week. I was amazed at some of these sweet friends' tracing skills!

One of our favorite activities this week was getting to take care of our "pets" in our classroom vet office! Everyone had the opportunity to choose a pet and use all of our vet tools to do check-ups on their pet. They did a great job!

To complete our August Bible study, we simply talked about the fact that God loves us so much that it could never be measured. We tried to use measuring tools to measure it and concluded that nothing could hold or measure all of God's great love. We practiced the song "God Loves Us" by using our rhythm sticks!

See if your child can do the following things this week...

1. Help you build or draw the letters M, P, and F (even out of one of their favorite snacks)!

2. Find three things in your house that start with the letter P.

3. Trace a circle and a square.

4. Sort something into colors (such as cereal, Legos, crayons, etc.).

5. Help you take care of your family pet (or pretend to take care of a stuffed animal pet).