First week of school! 8/20/14

Important Dates to Remember: 
September 1st - Labor Day; no preschool

Special notes:
For many of your children, it is their first time in a formal school setting. I think it would be a great idea to have pictures of the children's families that they can keep in their cubbies in case they need to look at a familiar face. If you would like to bring a picture of your family to school, we can laminate them here, where your children can look at them, and maybe show their family to their friends. 

THIS WEEK’S LITERACY EXPERIENCES
Morning Books
"Bark, George" by Jules Feiffer
"Five Little Monkeys Sitting in a Tree" by Eileen Christelow
"Pizza" by Saturnino Romay

Afternoon Books
"Franklin is Bossy" by Paulette Bourgeois
"Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle

PLANNING & RECALL
The Plan-Do-Review process is one of the critical aspects of the HighScope curriculum. We'll take a look at the "plan" aspect of the process this week. Here is a quote that summarizes planning time: "When young children plan, they develop specific ideas about what they want to do, how they will do it, and with whom they will play...Children’s planning and skills will move from the simple and concrete to the more complex and abstract, with [the teacher's] support, as they become familiar with the plan-do-review process." (HighScope Press)
For planning time, teachers will plan little group games or activities to make planning interactive for children. This week we use binoculars to search around the room for the area in which we would like to play.

BIBLE LESSON
Bible lesson sheets from our Christlight curriculum will be sent home at the beginning of every week. It would be a wonderful supplement to our daily Bible lesson at school if you would like to read them at home with your child.

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.

Bible verse: Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
Bible song: "In the Beginning"

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 beads onto pipe cleaners, using tweezers and tongs to place pom-poms into egg cartons, and on Friday will get a chance to choose from a variety of fine motor activities: lacing cards and beads, puzzles, and plastic links. 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.