October 24-28
Irvington Pre-K Newsletter October 24-28, 2011
Happy Spider Week, Pre-K Families! This has been a wonderful week of learning about spiders and enjoying the cool sunny days of fall. The students impressed us with their incredibly long list of things they already knew about spiders, and they only had a few questions. However, we did have a lot of new things to add to the ‘what we learned’ side of the spider chart. The letter of the week was “D” and the students were very creative coming up with so many great d-words during the share circle, as well as throughout the week. We also began a new weekly job. This is the greatly anticipated Person of the Week! Each student will have an opportunity to be Person of the Week, and it comes with the honor of being Line Leader! We interview the student so that we may all learn more about this individual, and they also receive a special book created by their classmates.
Quick Thanks & Reminders
We want to thank Kate and her family for the tasty snack contribution. We also want to thank Helen, Darwin’s mom, for the assorted art supplies. It was a great help.
*Please do not send your child to school in face-paint or costumes as it is a distraction and we are a holiday-free program.
*Also, there is a sign-up for the November 8th Pre-K Potluck. We will need coordinators and food for this event to be a success!
This week we learned about Darwin, our first Person of the Week. Darwin is 5 years old, is “really heavy”, and has brown hair and green eyes. He really likes looking around the world with a map, building stuff and making snowflakes. He doesn’t like eating healthy food all the time and playing with guys he doesn’t like. Some of Darwin’s favorite foods are ice cream, chocolate and candy! When he grows up he wants to be a beautiful girl. If Darwin could be granted 3 wishes, he would wish for more games, one more beyblade and a toy that makes a rainbow.
On Monday, we started off creating a chart of all that the students knew about spiders. We read a great nonfiction book called The Life Cycle of a Spider that gave us even more information about spiders. We knew that spiders have 8 legs, spin webs, eat bugs, have lots of eyes, can be poisonous or not and can crawl, which can “tickle or feel weird when it’s on your body.” We learned that spiders are called spiderlings when they are very young spiders, and that they eat their way out of the egg sack. Also, some spiders will eat other spiders! We learned that spiders are not insects, they are arachnids. They do not have wings or antennae, but look as if they are flying through the air which is called ballooning. We read some funny fictional books about spiders like Miss Spider’s ABC and Miss Spider Drives a Car. We also sang Itsy Bitsy Spider, which has over 5 verses. We had fun singing them in different voices too. Today we celebrated Lily’s 5th birthday! We sang happy birthday, and each student made a birthday page for her birthday book. Lily shared some photos from her birthday this year too. During our share circle, we had many students share some dynamic d-words.
Lucia brought in a stuffed animal dog and her last name is Del Solar. Ben shared photos of his dog Nigel which is a German short-hair pointer. Lily shared photos of swimming with dolphins, and that she had a dolphin birthday cake. Helen Colletti shared a daisy that “me and my daddy pressed”, and Brady shared a dragon bank that he painted, which surely has many dimes inside. Our special project for today was making Person of the Week pages for Darwin’s book. Each student dictated why they like Darwin and drew a picture to support their thoughts and words. This is a great way for students to think critically and formulate specific examples of their feeling/emotions.
On Tuesday, we had a visitor from the Multnomah County Library! Nina, the Albina Youth Librarian, came and read some very funny books to us. She read Rhyming Dust Bunnies and Talking Vegetables, which is about a very unhelpful spider. Nina also dropped off library card applications if you want to sign your child up for their very own library card! We also read The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle and made our own busy spider collages. Students arranged the pre-cut pieces, glued and decorated these into very handsome spiders. Many students added webs, extra eyes and baby spiders. Your child will be proud to show them off to you! During share, we were treated to a wide variety of “D” related items. Netta shared a close-up photo of a red dragonfly, Zachary shared his hand-blown glass duck, Phoebe brought several dominoes and explained how the game works she said, “you match the numbers together.” Tessa brought in a dime, which she found in her penny-bag and told us it is worth 10 pennies, and Leo shared an amazing paper-mache flying dinosaur that has “gold shining out in the sun” on it. The students have also been enjoying playing with the alphabet bags. These bags have small items that start with the letter of the bag (such as an apple in the “A” bag, a ball in the “B” bag, etc) and the students give each other “clues” about what the item is. They are working on amazing literacy skills while having lots of fun! This is easy and fun to play around the house while you are helping your child select an item for share.
On Wednesday, we read several great books! We discussed how spiders use their spinnerets to form or weave their silky webs. We read Aaaargh, Spider, Sophie’s Masterpiece, and Spider’s Spin Webs. All of these books gave us a look at how beautiful their webs can be and how they are very important living creatures. Each student made a beautiful, sparkly glitter web as they pretended to be a spider themselves. These wonderful pieces of art are hanging on the back wall and look fantastic! We also celebrated Darwin’s 5th birthday. We sang happy birthday and each student made a birthday page for his birthday book. During the share circle, Willem told us that he really likes spiders “because they make pretty webs, eat bugs and garden spiders are nice in houses.” Mary told us she also likes spiders because “without spiders we’d be swamped” with bugs. Dane shared a wonderful photo of a dragonfly. Isa shared that her brother is named Diego and he “likes to play science and does science for real” and Darwin shared a lollipop drum and played us a dandy beat.
On Thursday, we started to prepare for the Spider’s Tea Party! We made sure all the spider art was hung around the room to honor spiders and we made party spider hats, of course. Students made black construction paper spider hats with googly-eyes, fan-folded or straight legs (most hats have eight legs) and a variety of personal touches to make each hat unique.
We read The Eensy Weensy Spider Freaks Out! (very silly), which is a good book about trying hard and not giving up. We also read Anansi The Spider and Aaaargh, Spider. During our share circle, Liam shared a board book written in Spanish about dump trucks, which he has had since he was a baby. Olivia shared photos of her dance class, where she is performing some very lovely ballet, and Paxton made us all laugh with his duck call and disguise. Kate told us about some d-words she knows like her rubber duck, her dad and her dog- all that are in her house, Quinn shared some drawings he made, one of a spider web and one with a monkey- both for his grandma, and Julian shared a day early with a spooky drawing of a haunted house and pumpkins. We also did a lot of silly dancing and singing. We have made many fun variations on the song Itsy Bitsy Spider. We like the Big Hairy Spider, the Little Crying Spider and the Very Angry Spider. We are getting very good a comical improvisation.
On Friday, we had tons of fun celebrating what we learned about spiders at our Spider Tea Party! Everyone wore their lovely party hats and were excited to make our “project”. We decorated spider cupcakes! Each student got a white cupcake, chocolate frosting, red licorice for legs and M&M’s for the eyes. The students frosted and decorated their own cupcake and showed great skill at handling this tricky, yet yummy job! We read Miss Spider’s Tea Party, A Diary of a Spider and The Daddy Longlegs Blues. We learned that daddy long legs aren’t actually spiders at all! We sang lots of spider songs and danced our best spider-dance-moves. For share time, Helen C-U shared her mom’s dollar that is “real money!”, Odessa shared a stuffed dog that she had “when I was a baby” and Jaden also shared a dollar that his mom said he “can keep too”. We enjoyed eating our projects during snack time and drinking spider-cider. We ran off all the “excitement” outside after snack, which is a reversal from our usual schedule. Many thanks, for this was a wonderful week!
Enjoy the weekend!
Pre-K Team
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