Newsletter 11/6/13

Important Dates to Remember
November 7 – Picture Day
November 28-29 – No Preschool (Thanksgiving Break)

THIS WEEK’S LITERACY EXPERIENCES
Morning Books
Rosie’s Walk  Pat Hutchins
It Looked Like Spilt Milk  Charles Shaw
Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus  Mo Willems
Safari  Gail Tuchman

Afternoon Books
Down by the Station  Jennifer Riggs Vetter

PLANNING & RECALL
As children become familiar with the planning process, the clarity of each child’s plan develops. For a younger child, or a child new to the planning process, his or her plan may start as a vague plan. When asked, “What are you going to do today?” they may respond simply by saying, “Go over there,” or “Make something.” As children become more familiar with the idea of making plans, they begin to make routine plans. These are simple plans in which children mention an activity as a beginning point such as, “Play with blocks,” or “Cutting.” Detailed plans are complex plans children make in which they mention a beginning point, goal, or outcome. A detailed plan may sound like this, “Make a Robin Hood hat. With a feather, a real one.” Children’s plans change as they become familiar with available materials, their peers, and their own ability to make plans and think about how to carry them out. This week during planning time a ball will be rolled to each child when it is their turn to plan.

BIBLE LESSON
Adam and Eve were the crown of God’s creation. They were created to be above all things God had made. They enjoyed perfect living in the beautiful Garden of Eden. God gave them an opportunity to worship him and show love to him by obeying his command. He said they could eat from any tree in the garden except the tree in the middle. One day Satan appeared to Eve in the form of a snake and tempted her to doubt God’s words.” Instead of dying when eating from that tree, you’ll become like God instead—knowing good and evil!” Eve saw the fruit was desirable for gaining knowledge, so she ate of the fruit and then shared some with Adam and he ate it as well. Immediately, Adam and Even knew they had sinned against God by doing what he told them not to do, and they were ashamed and afraid. Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the snake. They deserved to die for their sin, and death would indeed now be a result of sin. However, God showed his compassionate love in promising to send Someone to crush the serpent’s head, defeating Satan. That Someone is God’s very Son Jesus, who would one day come to be the Savior of the world. 

MUSIC 
This week the children experiment with dynamics—loud and soft. Using the song “Listen, Listen to Me”, children have the opportunity to distinguish between loud and soft sounds. In the past weeks, we have used our voices to practice loud sounds like shouting, and soft sounds like whispering. This week we add musical instruments to imitate loud and soft sounds. Some of the instruments we are using include a tambourine, egg shaker, bells, and clappers.

MOVEMENT
Movement time is an important part of the day because it helps with a child’s physical development. Large motor skills, spatial and body awareness and healthy behavior are learned through movement activities. Children learn to move their bodies in different ways—quickly, slowly, crawling, flying, jumping, and tiptoeing. As children dance to the songs, “From Here to There” and “Song about Slow, Song about Fast,” they learn to self-regulate, or control their bodies. Movement time is a great way to get our hearts beating faster, laugh, and build relationships with each other as we dance and move together.

SMALL GROUP TIME
The KDI for this week’s small group activities is body awareness. Just as large movement activities help children become aware of their bodies, body awareness can occur on a smaller scale as well. When children arrange things, or use words like “around, through, over, and under” they are making sense of the space they and other materials take up.  The materials we are using this week to explore body awareness include play dough as we create hens and recreate “Rosie’s Walk”, one of our morning stories. We’ll also use manipulatives, colored blocks and our bodies to position them in different ways. On Friday we will use simple treasure maps to go on a hunt for “treasure”.

AFTERNOON EXPERIENCES
After rest time, the children will explore the KDI shapes.  Children will use geoboards and tangrams to create different shapes on Monday. We will also sort shapes by size and color, create some of our own shapes using toothpicks and packing peanuts, make a shape collage, and create 3D shape structures using blocks and magnet-tiles.