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). 

We did such a good job counting how many bones to feed the dog!

Painting pet rocks!

Woof! Woof!

Look at these smart girls!

Lacing fun!

Look at these good writers!

We made bird nests in our 

sensory bin this week!

Everyone is playing together so well!

Birthday boy!

Pet rocks!

Friends and Family Week!

We had a great second week in our class! We are learning each other's names and quickly becoming friends! Mrs. Katie and I have had so much fun watching everyone interact and get to know one another. 

This week, we celebrated that God gave us families and friends.  We read a variety of books about friends and family, including What Mommies Do Best, What Daddies Do Best, It's Okay to Be Different, and Rainbow Fish.  Everyone did so well listening and responding to what we read! 

As we discussed being a good friend, we talked a lot about sharing. We learned about the importance of sharing from the Rainbow Fish and created our own rainbow fish (while practicing how to use dot markers). We also discussed the parable of the rich man's barns. In this parable, the farmer decided to build bigger barns to store up extra food for himself instead of sharing what he had with others. We used this as a lesson to remind us to always share what we have with others. We also talked about working together with our friends by making a friendship cake this week! We all mixed a different color into our cake batter and then marveled at our rainbow cake! We talked about how we can do so much more when we work together. 

To go along with letter F this week, we enjoyed creating fancy feathery fans, building the letter F out of pompoms, and fingerprinting the letter F. We even created our own friendship frames! We also focused on the number 2 and learning the circle shape... In our centers, we  made circles with buttons and worked together to do shape sorting. We are so smart! We also enjoyed stringing beads, playing with play dough, and building in our centers!

We also had fun learning about each other's families with the family collages... Thank you so much for helping your sweet little ones create these! They are now hanging up in our room!

Finally, we got introduced to our "box of rhythm" this week. We will be learning rhythm and many other skills through our poems and songs this year. Everyone loved shaking our maracas and tapping our rhythm sticks with our poem/song of the week, "Skidamarink". This poem is the first poem in your child's poetry folder that went home in their bag!

This week, see if your child can...

1. Tell you our Bible verse. (You can practice together!)
2. Make a letter F and a letter M out of objects in your house or yard. 
3. Count 2 different items. 
4. Find five circles in your house. 
5. Tell you two ways to be a good friend!

We had so much fun making our friendship frames!

Rainbow fish!

Our fancy fans were "fantastic"!

We were very creative making "play dough friends"!

F is for fingerprints!

Dressing up our magnet friends for school... 

We are doing so well at table trading!

Look at these experts!

 

We loved working together on our block towers. 

We loved playing outside with our friends!

We got introduced to the green room this week.

Friendship cake!