September 26-30, 2011

Irvington Pre-K Newsletter September 26-30, 2011

Hello Pre-K Families! We want to thank you for your assistance in another wonderful week. Also, a big “thank you” to Quinn and his family for the exciting and tasty snacks of fruits and vegetables. This week we began to discuss friends, friendship, and what it means to be a friend. We shared what we like to do with our friends, who are friends can be (even siblings and relatives) and that we can have many friends. We discussed that we are all friends in the classroom too. Students have new jobs this week and we have begun a “share-time” rotation (see schedule and expectations below). Also, we have introduced “sign-in sheets” for the students to start getting into the habit of writing their names and placing their sign-in sheet into the basket as part of their morning/afternoon routine.

****Next week we will begin our Letter of the Week study, and each week will be dedicated to a letter. Next week’s letter is “A”. We ask that students bring in a share item that is focused on the Letter of the Week or our Weekly Theme (which is emailed in the curriculum). Please help your student select 1 items (please no toys!), an experience, drawing, book or photograph that relates to the Letter of the Week or our Theme. We want the students to share things/experiences that are relevant to the curriculum. This is their “homework”, but it should be fun! Any further questions should be directed to Candice or Laura. Thank you for your assistance.

Share Schedule

Monday: Lily, Ben, Brady, Lucia, Helen Colletti

Tuesday: Netta, Phoebe, Tessa, Zachary, Leo

Wednesday: Willem, Mary, Darwin, Dane, Isa

Thursday: Liam, Kate, Olivia, Paxton, Quinn

Friday: Aidan, Jaden, Helen C-U, Odessa, Julian

A Window Into Pre-K Lunch

We want to let everyone know what happens throughout the day and often we cannot spend much time talking with each of you either at morning/afternoon drop-off or at pick-up. We are going to use this space to “check in” about a few topics. The topic this week is lunch time. We would appreciate it if you would please talk with your child about eating at lunch time. Ask them what they are doing during lunch, who they sit next to, or what they liked best about their lunch. We eat together in the classroom as a whole group (from 11 to 11:30), and this may be a new experience for your child. We ask that you pack a lunch that your child will like to eat but keep in mind they may suddenly develop new tastes or they may enjoy eating the same foods everyday. We encourage all students to eat their food, to use polite table manners, to enjoy their table mates through social interaction and to use their eating-time wisely. We make several reminders to the whole group as well as individually for students to focus on eating. However, we cannot “force” anyone to eat! We want students to recognize when they are hungry and when they have had enough, so that they may appropriately negotiate this for themselves in the future. We also offer a snack at 2:00 for full day and afternoon students, and the same scenario applies during snack time.

On Monday, we began our discussion on friendship. Students shared what they thought a friend is. Some of their examples are: “they like to be together, keep old friends and make new ones, visit each other, have play-dates, play together, be nice, have fun and take turns with toys”. We read several books on friendship like, My Friends/Mis Amigos, Me and My Animal Friends, My Friends and Frog and Toad are Friends. We also sang Make New Friends. Students each made a drawing of something they like to do with their friends and we wrote down what they think a friend is. These drawings are hanging on the back wall above the kitchen-area by the sign “A Friend is…”. During our share circle, each student shared what they like to do with their friends. Lily likes to have sleepovers, Lucia likes to go to the beach, Ben likes to have play-dates, Helen Colletti likes going on walks with Sammy Doggy to the market, and Brady likes to play games with his mom and dad because “they’re my friends too.” Great job, Pre-K!

On Tuesday, we continued our conversation about friends and friendship. Students had the opportunity to make a “mini-me”. Students “dressed themselves” with felt, sequins, yarn, and drew on faces, hands, hats and shoes. These mini-me friends will be adorning our walls. These mini-me’s represent each of us as a classroom of friends. Students enjoyed the many books we read about friendship. These books portray the normal ups and downs and eventual cooperation that is present in many relationships. We read These are My Friends, Digger and Lew, Angelina and Alice and more from Frog and Toad are Friends. During share students continued to share about what they like to do with their friends and we learned that Netta likes to put together princess/fairy puzzles with her friends, Leo like to go on play-dates, Tessa likes to play hide & seek, Zachary likes to swimming especially going down water slides, and Phoebe loves to play with her sister because she loves her and her sister is her friend! During our closing circle we read several fun books about shapes, colors, numbers and the alphabet. These books included 20 Is Too Many, Metropolitan Museum Shapes and Metropolitan Museum ABC. Wonderful job, Pre-K!

On Wednesday, we talked specifically about how to be a friend. We practiced greeting each other, as friends do, and discussed how we look each other in the eyes, smile and often ask, “ do you want to play with me?”, and about using words that make our friends feel good. Throughout the day, we sang more songs about friends. We sang a fun one called, Will You Be a Friend of Mine. It is sung to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb and everyone gets to dance, jump, or make a silly face when we call out an action. Ask our child to sing it to/with you. We read George & Martha: Rise and Shine, George & Martha: One Fine Day, Finklehopper Frog and more from Frog and Toad, Friends Forever. For our project, we each made a Fuzzy Buddy/Warm Fuzzy. The students decorated large puff-balls with googley eyes and heart-shaped foam feet/ears/wings. Many of the students named their fuzzy buddy and were excited to introduce them to their pet rocks and family. During our share circle we learned more about what we like to do with our friends. Willem shared that he likes to play with his Zhu-Zhu pets and dress-up, May likes to play chase and make “icky-stew”, Darwin likes playing tag and watching movies, Dane likes to play “I Spy” and hide & seek (both inside and outside) and Isa likes to have play dates at the park or at her house. Fantastic job, Pre-K!

On Thursday, we reviewed many of the friendship concepts we learned throughout the week. We reread My Friends/Mis Amigos, and These Are My Friends. Both of these books have great photographs showing the characters with all their friends and clear and direct language about friendship. Students shared quickly with each other about different friends they have both in school and out. We also read My Friend Rabbit. We changed the project from the originally planned friendship “quilt” to make a friendship “chain”. Many students were familiar with making these simple paper chains and were excited to decorate them so that we may hang them up in our classroom. Students used cut strips of construction paper, wrote their names and decorated them with dot-markers and regular markers. These will be hung in our classroom for the year. We continued to focus our share circle on the same theme for the week. We learned that Liam likes having play dates with friends and “doing somersaults on the couch”, Olivia likes to go to her neighborhood park, Paxton likes surfing and fishing at the beach house, Quinn enjoys playing hide & seek and sharing his toys, and Kate likes to go to the Arcade. We sang another song about friendship today that is sung to the tune of Farmer and the Dell. Students each take turns finding a friend from the circle to join them in the center. We sang Let’s Find a Friend, Let’s Find a Friends, etc, until each student is standing in the center holding hands. It was great to see students selecting both old friends and new friends. At our closing circle today, we read the pages the students drew based on the book Quick as a Cricket. We read each page, showed the pictures to the students and everyone took home their page. At the end we gave our classroom book a big round of applause. It is wonderful to see how clever each of our students are!

On Friday, we read a few more books about friendship Goggles, The Little White Owl and Frog and Toad Together Forever. We had another chance to sing Let’s Find a Friend and Make New Friends. Today we also made friendship necklaces for each other. Each student was in charge of making a necklace that they would love to receive and then we randomly passed them out to each student. This helps reinforces the concept of classroom friends and is viewed as a special gift or a random act of kindness. Enjoy! We also learned what a few more students like to do with their friends. We learned Aidan likes to go on road trips to the Rouge River, Jaden likes to jump on a trampoline and go fishing in Africa, Odessa likes to go with her mimi and papa to hotels and have sleepovers, Julian likes to play Harry Potter and “hot lava monster” and Helen Cruz-Uribe likes to go on walks when she has play dates, and play with her Playmobile toys. Super week, Pre-K!

Enjoy the weekend!

Pre-K Team