Faith Lutheran Preschool eNews: Newsletter 10/29/14

Important Dates to Remember:
October 30th-November 2nd - Scholastic Book Fair at Faith
November 3rd - Scholastic book orders are due back for personal book orders
November 23rd - Preschool students sing in church at Faith at 11:00AM

Special Notes:

The cold weather is upon us. Thanks for bringing in snow gear and all the appropriate warm clothes for you child. The children are working hard at becoming independent dressers. Putting all that gear on can be a lot of work. It would be a great help for us teachers if you encouraged independent dressing at home as well. The more practice, the better. Check out this article for some valuable information:
Teaching Your Child to Get Dressed

THIS WEEK’S LITERACY EXPERIENCES
Morning Books
"The Napping House" by Audrey Wood
"The Doorbell Rang" by Pat Hutchins
"Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale" by Mo Willems

Afternoon Books
"City Dog, Country Frog" by Mo Willems

PLANNING & RECALL
This week's planning and recall activity focuses on name recognition. The children's names are written on a piece of paper, and the children take turns drawing a slip from a hat. We then work together as a group to read the name that was drawn. It's then that person's turn to plan. The children are quite expert at identifying each other's first letter, so some names are quite easy to read. It can get pretty tricky with all the children's names that start with "A" though!

BIBLE LESSON
God's people continued to live in the land of Egypt for many years and were called Israelites. The new king in the land became worried that the large number of Israelites would turn against him and join his enemies in fighting against him. He made the Israelites work very hard as his slaves, making bricks and working in the fields. Finally, the king made a new order to have all Israelite baby boys killed by being thrown into the river. One Israelite woman hid her newborn son at home, but as he grew older it became harder to hide him. She made a basket, placed her son in it, and set it among the tall plants in the river. The baby's sister stood nearby and watched the basket. Soon the daughter of the king came to the river to wash herself. She saw the basket floating in the river and after retrieving it and finding the baby, she felt sorry for him and wanted to keep him as her own. The baby's sister came to the king's daughter and asked if she would like her to find an Israelite woman to feed and care for the baby while he was still so young. The king's daughter agreed and the sister went to find the baby's own mother, who took care of him until he was older. When he grew older, she took him back to the palace to live, and the king's daughter raised him as her son, and gave him the name Moses.

Bible verse: Psalm 31:15a "My times are in your hands."
Bible song: "Consider How the Birds Above" (We'll be singing verses from this hymn for quite a while because we're learning it to sing in church on November 23rd)

MUSIC
We bring a variety of concepts into Music Time this week. It may seem unlikely, but one of the concepts we're working on is building relationships and cooperative play. One of the chants we learn is called "One to Ten Circle" where we work on moving in a circle cooperatively, without hurting or pulling our neighbors. In the second song called "The Moose Song", we work on a sung call and response. The teacher sings part of the song, and then the children copy and repeat it back. The song is pretty silly. The moose named Fred drinks his juice in bed, and becomes a sticky moose! Finally, we tie literature into Music Time with the book "The Wheels on the Bus" by Maryann Kovalski.

MOVEMENT
This is our last week of working with scarves during Movement Time. Children have the opportunity to dance to two familiar songs, "Kuma San" and "Caterpillars to Butterflies". We also continue to practice a variety of tossing challenges such as tossing and clapping as many times as we can before we catch it. We've also been working on the tricky concept of making different shapes by folding our scarves. Most of us can do rectangles, squares, and triangles. We add a fun game called "Abracadabra" this week as well. We pretend to be magicians who hide their scarves up their sleeve, or in their pocket, or under their shirt before we shout "abracadabra!" and reveal them.

SMALL GROUP TIME
This week during small group time, we’re focusing on the Key Developmental Indicator (KDI): Number Words and Symbols. Young children encounter numbers and number concepts all the time in their environment. They learn to use cardinal numbers (zero, one, two...) and also ordinal numbers (first, second, third...). Children develop what is called "number sense", the awareness that numbers represent the quantity of things in a set and can be manipulated or operated on in various ways. The ways we encouraged "number sense" this week include sticking buttons onto number templates with sticky tack, shaping numbers with playdough and making the corresponding number of playdough apples, sorting dominoes by number, rolling dice and building a unifix cube tower with the same number of blocks as the number we rolled on the dice, and adding blocks to a taped number line on the floor.