Mrs. Rachel's Three's Class: November 2019

We are thankful for another wonderful week at preschool! Really and truly, Mrs. Katie and I are so thankful to get to be with this sweet group each week.

With Thanksgiving being this coming week, we learned about and celebrated Thanksgiving a week early. We read a book about the first Thanksgiving, several books about being thankful, and several fun turkey books (of course)! We enjoyed doing a variety of fun turkey activities, making turkeys from Fruit Loops and creating turkeys out of paper strips.

We also used turkeys to help us with our math skills this week. A few of our fun activities included gluing 5 feathers on a turkey and stuffing a turkey bye rolling a dice and counting. We also spent a lot of time talking about what we are thankful for. Our biggest desire is that every child left with a thankful heart this week. We all took time to talk about and write down what we were thankful for. The sweet notes will be added to your child's portfolio (and can be found right now in the hallway).

We also had fun making a heart craft that we will give to our grandparents next week at Grandparents Day. Thank you so much to my sister Melody (Mollie's mom) who came in to help us make these!

Some of the skills we worked on this week were the letter T and sorting words by initial sound (using a fun turkey game). We continue to use a sight word book each week to work on learning how to turn pages and looking for letters we know in the text. We also had fun with our poem this week, "Five Little Turkeys". You can find our fun Five Little Turkeys song in your child's poetry folder. We also continued to review the numbers one through five, as well as counting to 10. We are working towards everyone being able to count to 20 now. This is something that you can practice all week at home!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Over Thanksgiving break, see if your child can...

1. Help you write down things your family is thankful for.

2. Tell your family our November verse. "I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart."

3. Practice counting to 20.

4. Help you cook something.

5. Find a circle, rectangle, triangle, and square in your home.

Look for these in the hallway!

We are becoming letter writing experts!

We worked hard on our grandparent gifts!

Turkey finger puppet fun :)

Dotting letter T

Sorting by initial sound... We did great!

Fruit Loop Turkeys :)

We love the sensory bin!

We also love to build!

Stuffing the turkey and putting 5 feathers on

Oh how this sweet class makes us smile! They are hilarious, smart, silly, and sweet!

First of all, THANK YOU SO MUCH for the donations to Operation Christmas Child! We were able to fill two boxes that will be sent out next week! What a blessing! Thank you for your generosity.

Our focus this week was on how to keep our bodies healthy and strong. We really packed a lot into a few days. Some of our topics of discussion were healthy foods to eat, how to make our bones and muscles strong, exercise, using our five senses, and how to stay free of germs. I think we could have spent much longer on this topic!

One our fun activities this week was outlining our bodies and then putting on facial features and decorating. We let the students do this independently, so hopefully you smiled when you saw your child's creative work! (We had a few left in the classroom, so if you didn't get home with yours, I have it to send home next week.) Everyone also independently created their bodies out of different kind of noodles! This was great fine motor work.

To work on the letter F, we also used carrots and celery to dot paint the letter! What a fun way to talk about how vegetables are healthy for our bodies! We also had Freddy Frog visit our room and had fun singing our song "Five Green and Speckled Frogs" as our interactive poem. We will add these to poetry folders next week!

One of our best learning moments this week was sorting food into which foods were healthy and which were unhealthy. Many had a look of astonishment when we told them that ice cream had to go in the "bad for our bodies" bucket! :) Some of our other activities included building sandwiches and tacos with felt food, counting with fruit, and doing number exercises. We talked about different ways that we can exercise and did a fun sorting activity of what is an is not exercise. We even learned about exercise with the book Bearobics and Get Up and Go! as well as by having a dance party in our own room!

Our science experiment this week was a glitter germ experiment. We put glitter paint (aka "germs") on everyone's hands and let them look at how many germs can be stuck on our hands. We learned a new "Wash Your Hands" song and discussed how washing our hands is so important (because just like the glitter, germs spread on everything we touch).

We continue to do our table trading at the end of the day to work on fine motor skills, math skills, and spatial skills... Everyone is doing great! Many of our friends are beginning to identify the numbers 1-5 with ease. The more you can count and write numbers with your child, the better! Our stations this week included building Mr. Potato Heads, working on lacing by "suturing" a cut, making shapes out of "bones" (Q-tips), and tracing.

Our Bible focus (besides talking about how God made our bodies) was on being thankful for the friends that God gives us. We talked about Jonathan and David and how they set a good example of friendship. We even learned a fun new song for the month: "Thank You God"! Here it is if you want to sing and dance to it at home! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyaSgIpVALc

See if your child can: