We took our shape books home this month. We had so much fun making them.  We made lots of animals with shapes; we made heart pigs, oval bunnies, rectangle tigers, diamond fishes and scary triangle dinosaurs. We also enjoyed cooking with shapes. We made yummy square brownies and star cookies. Just like in our books we made our very own circle pizzas and we usedtriangle ice cream cones to hold our homemade ice cream!

The following week we brought our teddy bears to school. We liked that very much. We made our teddy’s a cute little blanket that was paintedespecially for them. We made binoculars, went on a bear hunt and we weren’t scared. To finish off the week, we had a teddy bear picnic. We enjoyed fresh squeezed orange juice and popcorn out in the yard. For our President’s week we made star necklaces and put a shinny Abe Lincoln penny right in the middle. Our pennies wereextra shinny after we cleaned them with water, salt and vinegar. We also had fun making quarters, pennies and painting money.

Vanessa & Susan

3 year old preschool class 

This month our class completed our Insect Unit. We learned about the life cycle of the butterfly and made butterfly sequence charts, ending withbeautiful, colorful butterflies.  We, then, learned about the ladybug’s life cycle and why they are a favorite insect of farmers. We made ladybug puppets to bring home. Last, we learned about  the importance of bees and how they are responsible for all our flowers and fruit. We made bee puppets from paper bags and were very careful of their stingers. We shared some honey and saw a real honeycomb. Our science unit for next month will be the weather.

We continued on our “letter of the week” activities with children filling their letter bags with items from home that begin with that week’s letter. The children and parents are very creative with this activity.— I have been surprised many times when a child opens his or her bag. We cut out houses for H Week and glued them together, complete with addresses and street signs. I Week was a  favorite  - we made our own yummy vanilla ice cream and served it with sprinkles. On J Week, we mashed strawberries, added sugar and pectin and cooked up a delicious batch ofstrawberry jam. We also made paper jets and dictated where we would go in our jets. The children came up with some inventive places. On K Week, we learned about kites and how different temperatures of air make wind for the kites.

This is my last newsletter to you. It has been wonderful teaching yourchildren this year. They are a delightful and inquisitive bunch and I’ve had lots of fun listening to their stories. I will miss them and you. Vanessa is very  fortunate to have inherited such a lively and engaging group. They will enjoy the rest of the year under her guidance—they are lucky, too!

Stella

Pre-kindergarten class

We started February by celebrating Groundhog’s Day. We went outside and we saw our shadows…Oh No! 6 more weeks of winter! To celebrate the day, we made Groundhogs that popped out and a Groundhog book. To celebrate President’s Day, we created directed paintings of Honest Abe. We learned two President songs, made George Washington with his wig and talked about never telling a lie. We also made a GeorgeWashington book.

We can now write all of our upper case letters and have now started on c, o, and s in lower case. In math, we have started our addition unit. We are using cubes, bears and our fingers to find the answers.

We learned about Tu B Shvat (HappyBirthday to the trees). We made trees and learned all the parts of a tree using the “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” tune. We learned about all the gifts that trees give us.

Can you believe that we celebrated Day 100 this month? We celebrated by counting to 100, sharing our 100 items that we brought to make a friendship salad and by eating “100” slices of pizza. We made a Day 100 stamp book and learned to count by 10’s.

This month we started to phonetically write words in our writing journals. Remember to continue to practice the high frequency words. Reading backpacks continue to go home everyday. We have some awesome readers!

April & Kat

Three-Year-Old Class News

We started a new unit in January: Insects. We learned about the characteristics that all insects have in common and began our investigation by learning about ants. We paper-mached heads, thoraxes and abdomens, painted our ants black, attached 6 legs, 2 antennae and 2 eyes and we had model ants. We next learned about the ant’s life cycle and made “ant wheels” that illustrate the different stages. Our next step was learning about the butterfly’s metamorphosis. We created caterpillar and butterfly puppets and began a butterfly sequence chart that started with us cutting out paper caterpillar eggs.
We continued our “Letter of the Week” activities. We made chocolate chip donuts for D Week and learned about elephants for E Week. We made elephant hand puppets complete with sock-trunks. For F Week, we explored real fish and painted them to make fish prints. G Week brought the story of the Gingerbread Man. We baked our own gingerbread men but two of them were missing when we brought the pans back to class. We surmised that they had jumped out of the oven and luckily for us, our eagle-eyed preschoolers found them lounging in the classroom bookcase. One of our students hypothesized that the wind blew in through the door and blew the gingerbread men away. Another student thought that Susan, our aide, moved them. This class is especially adept in their critical thinking skills.
See you in February.
Stella and Julie

Pre-Kindergarten News

January is such a fun month in our class! We learned about Chinese New Year and made dragons, lanterns and fireworks to celebrate. The children nestled under a long dragon and paraded through the yard…what fun! We also learned about Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and explored the Hebrew word “kavod,” respect, and all its implications to the ways we treat ourselves and others.
Our theme for January was snowmen; we created books about snowmen, made giant snowmen and had a play “snowball fight” in our classroom.
We started writing in our writing journals this month by learning how to finish a sentence started by a prompt and ending our sentences with a period. We worked on printing the center-starter letters, such as C,O,Q,G and S. The children are becoming talented writers! The children also started bringing home reading backpacks this month. The children take home a different book each night to read to their families 3 times as well as word family flip-books to share.
Our brilliant Pre-K’ers are now adding numbers zero through five. We’ve continued exploring our location words, using hula hoop math as a way to get our whole bodies involved in the learning.
Whew….another busy month in the Pre-K room.
April and Kat

Painting with corn is fun.

Three-year-old Class News
Thanks to an unusually early-falling Hanukkah, we spent November working on both Thanksgiving and Hanukkah activities. The children created colorful turkeys and dictated to us what they are most thankful for– Mommies and Daddies were the most popular answers. We learned Hanukkah songs to sing to our families and entertained the residents of Leisure World with a Hanukkah concert.
We learned all about the Maccabees and the story of Hanukkah, we feasted on our hand-made latkes and applesauce and gambled our Goldfish as we spun the dreidel.
We also finished our paper mache ants and studied the life cycles of the butterfly and ladybug. We started our alphabet unit, working on a letter each week. For B Week we made our own bread and butter and for D week we’re learning about dinosaurs and fossils. We’re also working on an alphabet book that we’ll add a page to each week.
We hope you have a wonderful and restful winter break.
Miss Stella and Miss Julie

Pre-Kindergarten News
Our November was busy with Thanksgiving activities. We made a teepee for our classroom, complete with Native American symbols. The children chose Native American names for themselves and made headbands with feathers they earned for their good deeds. We used our repertoire of symbols to decorate our Native American vests. The class made Navajo sand paintings: the Navajo rain god we painted even made it rain that morning!
December was all about Hanukkah. We made gift trays for our families and drew pictures of each family member on the trays.
We’ve been practicing writing all the straight line letters, with our “writing frogs” jumping to the top of the letter. We are preparing the children for their beginning reading books by focusing on word tracking. The class is also making stick puppets for each letter to practice the letters’ sounds. We finished our graphing unit in math and we’re onto even more complex patterning.
Enjoy your children over the winter break.
Miss April and Miss Kat

• We painted large numbers and then counted items to glue on our numbers. The colorful numbers make great wall hangings for our bedrooms, to encourage counting and number recognition.
• We created number trains with animals in each car. When we finished, our trains were ready to go to the zoo.
• We finished our number unit by making Gumball Number Books. The children glued large, colorful paper gumballs to the gumball machines on each page. We looked at the number on each gumball machine and glued that number of gumballs until our last page had five bright gumballs in the 5 machine. The children were delighted when they finally got to take these books home.

Our class created beautiful frames for Father’s Day with our adorable pictures inserted for the dads to enjoy and display. We made Father’s Day cards in the shape of ties to go with the gifts.

Our month and school year ended with a crazy week! We had an outdoor arts and crafts day, then we wore our pajamas to school and had a “sleep-over party.” The next day we wore our clothes insideout and backwards and the final day was an ice-cream social. A great way to end a fantastic and productive school year!

We recalled that blood brings food and oxygen to all the parts of our bodies and discovered that our blood gets the food from our small intestines. Finally, our bodies were finished and ready to take home.

We worked on the last two letters of the alphabet. The children made yo-yos for Y
week and zeros for Z week. All the pages of our alphabet books were complete and the
children finally got to take those home, too.

We created Father’s Day gifts and cards that were sure to delight all the dads.

Our last week of school was lots of silly fun. The children had a blast working on outdoor art projects all day. The next day was Inside-Out-Backwards Day. Our class was greeted with “good-byes.” We promptly sat down to lunch, starting with
dessert, of course. We ran our entire day backwards until pick-up time when the children bid us “hello” to end the last day of school.