What a great week we had! We did shortly talk about Presidents' Day and do a few patriotic activities, but we spent the majority of our time doing an author study of Laura Numeroff! If you have any of her books at home, they might be a fun selection to read with your child in the next few weeks. The books that we read were If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, If You Give a Cat a Cupcake, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, and If You Give a Moose a Muffin. To go along with these books, some of our fun activities included making our own mouse paper bag puppets, painting pancakes, matching pancake letters in our sensory bin, sorting colors in muffin tins, counting cookies and chocolate chips, and "baking" play dough cupcakes. We also worked on the important early literacy skill of sequencing with all the events in the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. We had fun putting up the picture cards in order from the story.
We even did a class graph to see everyone's favorite cookies... See if your child can remember the favorite of the class (chocolate chip, M&M, or sugar)! One of our favorite activities of the week was singing our "Who Stole the Cookie?" song together! We added these to your child's poetry folder but then forgot to load the folders into bags... We will send them home Thursday!
Another fun activity was our visit from an orthodontist, Dr. Ernstberger, who came to talk to us all about oral health. Everyone was such a great listener! He generously gave every child a lunch bag with goodies inside! Wow!!
We have begun to increase our focus on some of the important skills to develop before next year. Our letter of the week was Kk, but we spent more time on tracing letters and working on our pencil grip. With a little help, everyone in the class did a fantastic job on this! If you are looking for some tricks to use at home to help your child with their grip, let me know! We also spent a lot of time working on number recognition and one-to-one correspondence this week. We also continue to work on cutting skills every week during craft time. This week, they cut their own triangles for their mouse puppet!
We continued our February focus on our verse "Love each other as I have loved you." We reviewed the story of Zacchaeus this week, discussing how that when we are friends with Jesus, we should love others as He loves us! We had fun singing about Zacchaeus with this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkd-QFD7vMA
We can't wait to see everyone next week!
Here are a few things you can ask your to do this week....
1. Sort two initial sounds. **Try laying out two different letters and see if your child can sort 5-6 pictures of words that begin with this letter. (You might need to emphasize and repeat the first sound several times to help them hear it.)
2. Show you how to hold their scissors and cut a straight line.
3. Match the correct number of objects to the numbers 1-5.
4. Tell you about the story of Zacchaeus!
5. Help you retell a story. (We are working on sequencing a story.)
We are getting so good at building our names!
Such amazing tracing!
We enjoyed sorting coins by the presidents!
Color sorting with muffin tins
We dotted our flags independently!
We are getting so good at initial sound sorts!
I hope everyone enjoyed their mouse puppets!
Look at our awesome grip!
Cupcake fun!
We are doing so well in the green room now!
We are having so much fun playing together!
We are such a creative group!!
