October 25th – Harvest Carnival 6:00-8:00PM
October 28th & 29th – No Preschool
THIS WEEK’S LITERACY EXPERIENCES
Morning Books
"The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear" Audrey Wood
"Thump, Thump, Rat-a-Tat-Tat" Gene Baer
"Is Your Mama a Llama?" Deborah Guarino
Afternoon Books
"Froggy Went a-Courtin’" Iza Trapani
"Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" Bill Martin Jr.
PLANNING & RECALL
The Plan-Do-Review process is the central element in the HighScope curriculum model. In making daily plans, following through on them, and then recalling what they have done, young children learn to articulate their intentions and reflect on their actions. Plan-Do-Review encompasses the elements of active learning, and children get the opportunity to decide what they are going to do based on their own interests. This week we planned by forming a train and visiting the different areas in which each child chose to work. This also helped familiarize the children where all the areas in the classroom are located.
BIBLE LESSON
We begin our school year with the story of God creating the beautiful world in which we live. Many people believe that our world just happened to fall, evolve, or bang together the way it is. That’s like dumping out pieces of a puzzle onto a table and thinking they will all come together just perfectly. That would never happen! There must be a person to put together that puzzle. The same is true with our beautiful world—it cannot just happen to start up on its own and work so well. Someone needed to put together all the puzzle pieces perfectly, and that Someone was God. In our lesson for this week, we learn what God created on each of the seven days of creation, and how everything he made was perfect. On the seventh day, when God was done making the world, he made that seventh day a special day to remember that his work was done.
MUSIC
This week the children will discover how the voice can produce several types of sounds—both speaking and singing sounds. We are learning the song “Good Queen Isabella”. As we go through the song, we will use our voices to speak, whisper, shout and sing the lyrics. When we become experts at using our voices in different ways, we also will include a game. Each child gets a chance to be Good Queen Isabella or Good King Alexander, wear a crown, and select which of the four methods of voice production we will use for that round.
MOVEMENT
As the children dance and follow the directions of songs, they continue to strengthen their control of large motor skills such as stretching, jumping, and clapping. This week we’ll dance to the song “Shake My Sillies Out”. Children will also practice the skill of controlling their bodies with the song “Dance Freeze”. It’s tricky to stop and freeze when the music does!
SMALL GROUP TIME
Each week during Small Group Time, children have the chance to engage in a hands-on learning experience, chosen by the teacher. The teacher chooses experiences based on the children’s interests which also meets one of the Key Developmental Indicators (KDI). The KDI for this week is fine motor skills. Each day children work with different materials in a variety of ways to develop fine motor skills. Children will be threading dried noodles through string, working with pipe cleaners and beads, pinning clothes pins onto containers, using eye droppers to mix colored water, and digging through sand to find buried treasures. Small Group Time allows the teacher to observe and learn about individual children on a daily basis, scaffold their knowledge, and converse and encourage children.
AFTERNOON EXPERIENCES
After Rest Time, the children are once again busy at the tables! Fine motor skills are put into practice again as they work with a variety of art materials. Children sculpted with play dough, explored texture by doing some rubbings, and painted with cotton and Q-tips. On Thursday children will have a chance to do some free drawing or painting of their choice, and on Friday we’ll put our large motor skills to use by marble painting.
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