Thankful Hearts

We are thankful for another wonderful week at preschool! Really and truly, Mrs. Andrea and I are so thankful to get to be with this sweet group each week.

With Thanksgiving being this coming week, we learned about and celebrated Thanksgiving a week early. We read several books about the history of Thanksgiving as well as what we can be thankful for on this holiday. We enjoyed doing a variety of fun turkey activities, including making a pine cone turkey with our names, making turkeys from Fruit Loops, and making turkeys out of paper strips.

We also used turkeys to help us with our math skills this week. A few of our fun activities included breaking down 10 as we made turkeys out of Popsicle sticks and stuffing a turkey bye rolling a dice and counting. We also spent a lot of time talking about what we are thankful for. Our biggest desire is that every child left with a thankful heart this week. We all took time to talk about, draw, and write down what we were thankful for. The sweet notes will be added to your child's portfolio.

To add in a little fun, our journal entry for this month was "How to Roast a Turkey". Each child drew a turkey and then gave me information on the steps to roasting a turkey... You can imagine how comical some of these are! These journals will also be included in your child's portfolio at the end of the year. 

We also had fun making a heart craft that we will give to our grandparents next week at Grandparents Day. Thank you so much to Amelia's Aunt Jenny who came in to help us make these!

Some of the skills we worked on this week were the letter T and reviewing all of the sight words we have done so far. We continue to use a sight word book each week to work on early literacy skills. We also had fun with two poems this week, "Five Little Turkeys" and "Alphabet Pie". You can find our fun Five Little Turkeys song in your child's poetry folder. We also continued to review the numbers one through 10, as well as ordinal numbers. We are working towards everyone being able to count to 50 now. This is something that you can practice all week at home!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Over Thanksgiving break, see if your child can...

1. Help you write down things your family is thankful for. 

2. Tell your family our November verse. "I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart."

3. Practice counting to 50. 

4. Help you cook something. 

5. Find a sphere, cube, rectangular prism, and cylinder in your home. 

We loved building with cranberries!

Turkey initial sound sort!

Look at these great readers!

We worked hard on the gifts for our grandparents!

Turkey letter tracing!

 We love the science center!

Gobble, gobble! Stuffing the turkey was quite fun. :) 

We loved getting to play outside!!

Exercise, Germs, Food, and More!

Oh how this sweet class makes us smile! They are hilarious, smart, silly, and sweet!

First of all, THANK YOU SO MUCH for the donations to Operation Christmas Child! We were able to fill two boxes that will be sent out next week! What a blessing! Thank you for your generosity. 

Our focus this week was on how to keep our bodies healthy and strong. We really packed a lot into a few days. Some of our topics of discussion were healthy foods to eat, how to make our bones and muscles strong, exercise, using our five senses, and how to stay free of germs. I think we could have spent much longer on this topic!

On Wednesday, we talked a lot about fruits and vegetables. We enjoyed talking about how different vegetables we eat are different parts of the plant by completing a fun vegetable flower craft. We also used carrots and celery to dot paint the numbers 9 and 10.  What a fun way to talk about how vegetables are healthy for our bodies! We also sorted vegetables and fruit, which was a bit more challenging than I anticipated, but it brought on some good conversation!

We also spent time talking about staying free of germs. We did a fun "glitter germ" demonstration to represent how we need to really scrub our hands in order to get all of the germs off of them. Being able to watch the glitter come off and go down the drain was helpful in understanding how to do a better job washing. We even learned a fun "Wash Your Hands" song together and made a craft showing dirty and clean hands that is hanging outside our door on our bulletin board!

We of course spent some time talking about the importance of exercise. We had fun doing number exercises using our big dice. We talked about different ways that we can exercise and did a fun sorting activity of what is and is not exercise. 

We had a large focus on reviewing the letters we have covered up to this point. We used food to help us with beginning sounds and spent time each day practicing writing these letters and saying their sounds. We searched for words and letters both in our poem of the week, "Go, Go, Go!" (in our poetry folders), and in our sight word book of the week called "Playing Ball".  In addition to reviewing all digits, we focused on number 10 this week. We also did some fun activities to introduce ordinal numbers. 

Our Bible focus (besides talking about how God made our bodies) was on being thankful for the friends that God gives us. We talked about Jonathan and David and how they set a good example of friendship. We even learned a fun new song for the month: "Thank You God"! Here it is if you want to sing and dance to it at home! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyaSgIpVALc

See if your child can: 

• Help you find letters they know in books throughout the week. 
• Help you identify foods that are healthy and unhealthy. 
• Do some form of exercise each day. 
• Review our Bible story about Jonathan and David.
• Build a tower out of vegetable cans and count them. 

They worked so hard on these!

We are doing so well at our independent stations!

This acorn letter game (bought with Trike-a-Thon money) was so fun!

We had fun with these food letter magnets. 

Finding "go" in our book of the week. 

Making salads was great scissor practice. 

Another journal entry for this month. We will put these journals in portfolios

at the end of the year!

We enjoyed tracing our hands!

I is for igloo! Marshmallows may have been 

a bit sticky!

Getting the glitter off our hands!

We love learning through playing!

We had some creative letter I objects!

Working on ordinal numbers

One of our students of the day

sharing her box!