Faith Lutheran Preschool eNews: Newsletter 9/24/14

Important Dates to Remember:
September 29th - "Making Life Better" class with Pastor Ewings; 6:30PM-8:00PM
October 17th - End of First Quarter; noon dismissal

Special Notes:
In order to make it easier for you to attend the "Making Life Better" classes with Pastor Ewings, we will be providing free care for your child(ren) in our preschool room while you're upstairs attending class. Please speak to the director if you plan on bringing your children and need care!

Don't forget to work on those comfort kits and bring those in to us as soon as they're ready!

THIS WEEK’S LITERACY EXPERIENCES
Morning Books
"Little Blue and Little Yellow" by Leo Lionni
"Do Crocs Kiss?" by Salina Yoon
"How Do Dinosaurs Say I'm Mad?" by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague
"Chicka Chicka Boom Boom!" by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault

Afternoon Books
"Franklin's Birthday Party" by Paulette Bourgeois
"Baa Baa Black Sheep" by Iza Trapani

PLANNING & RECALL
This week during planning and recall time, a bean bag was tossed to each child when it was their turn to share. Planning and recall time has now become part of each child’s daily routine at preschool. They have had practice doing it for about a month and it’s easy to see their excitement when it is their turn to share with the other children their plans for work time. During work time, children often refer to their plans with comments like, “I planned to go to the water table first,” or “I’m changing my plan to the kitchen area now.” This intentional thinking will continue to develop as time goes on.

BIBLE LESSON
God gave a very important promise to a man named Abraham. God planned to send his Son Jesus to be the Savior of the world – and he would come from Abraham’s family line. Abraham had no children and wondered how God’s promise would be fulfilled. God took Abraham outside to look at the night sky and promised him, “Count the stars, if you can. That’s how many people I will make come from your family.” And Abraham believed God’s promise. Abraham and his wife Sarah were very old when one day three visitors stopped by their tent. One was the Lord himself, and two were angels. After Abraham washed his guests’ feet and provided food for them, the Lord told Abraham that at this time the next year, his wife Sarah would have a son. Sarah, who had been listening from inside the tent, laughed when she heard this. The Lord responded by saying that nothing is too hard for God and restated his promise that Abraham and Sarah would have a son in a year. When the year was over, God kept his promise and gave Abraham and Sarah the blessing of a son, whom they named Isaac, just as God told them to do. Abraham and Sarah rejoiced in the promise and fulfilled promise of a son, just as they rejoiced in God’s promise to send his Son Jesus. We, too ,rejoice in knowing that nothing is too hard for God, and that God keeps all his promises to us.

Bible verse: 1 Timothy 2:3-4 "God our Savior wants all people to be saved."
Bible song: "Surely It Is God Who Saves Me"

MUSIC
Children have been practicing rests in music like you find in the song B-I-N-G-O. Another aspect to rhythm in music besides sound and silence is the duration of notes. Some notes are sung for a longer amount of time than other notes, and some silences are longer than others. This week’s new song is called “White Sand”. This song contains notes that are held longer than others, and to help us realize that, we use visual clues and we also move our arms to match the longer notes. This week we also sing songs called "Hello to You", "Johnny Works With One Hammer", and "You'll Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song".

MOVEMENT
This week during Movement Time, we talked about different animals we may see when we visit a zoo - elephants, zebras, flamingos, and cheetahs. We have a chance to walk or run as these animals, and then we get to make up an animal of our choice. We also introduce a new material into Movement Time this week: ribbons. We manipulate our ribbons around our bodies, up in the air and down low, and try making different shapes like circles. We close Movement Time by dancing with our ribbons to the song "Elephant Rainbow".

SMALL GROUP TIME
The KDI for this week’s small group activities is counting. Children enjoy counting and comparing the number of objects, people, actions, and events in their lives. When they practice counting they begin to construct rules of counting—things like only one number goes with each thing being counted (one-to-one correspondence), counting goes in a fixed order, and the last number they say means how many (the total). At the preschool level, errors in counting order are common. Typically children learn the sequence from one to five but then mix up the numbers that follow. The more they develop and practice, the more children accurately construct the “rules” of counting. This week we used muffin tins to put different amounts of buttons in each hole, we counted beans into cups, we used counting sheets to count Unifix cube towers, pinned the correct number of clothes pins onto cards with the corresponding number, and we counted coins onto dot cards.