Welcome to Preschool!

Welcome to Preschool!

When my kiddos from last year figured out that new kiddos would be with me this year they decided to make a welcome poster for them.

•  Thank you for all your patience while we were getting our program up and running. Despite a few bumps along the way, our first week of school went great! Here's a little of what we've been up to:

• We had the kiddos help us make up the classroom rules this year. This is what they came up with: 
• We play safely and keep our hands to ourselves. 
• We listen to each other. 
• We are nice to each other. 
• We keep our classroom clean. 
• We’ve been working hard to establish our daily routine. Encourage your child to talk about their day. Ask them to tell you about a story we read or what they did at choice time. We will be posting many pictures on the blog this week. Go through the post with your child and have them describe things to you. 
• We are focusing a lot on name recognition. Our children see their names all over our classroom. 
• We have also been going over the interest area rules and working together to clean up (remembering to look at pictures/labels to remind us where things go).
• We have received a few “All About Me” pages and house pictures. Please don’t forget to send these in so we can add them to our classroom. The house pictures may also be emailed to us.

Upcoming Events:

• Next week is spirit week. Here’s how we will be celebrating at preschool:
• Monday: Hat Day
• Tuesday: PJ Day
• Wednesday: Crazy Hair Day
• Thursday: Disney Day (or your favorite cartoon character)

Classroom Pictures:

This will be where all our important parent info is displayed. The newsletter, calendar, and menu will come home each month. Inside the binder on top of the shelf is our sign-in/sign-out, classroom info, and a copy of anything we send home.

This is the area of the room where our kiddos can go when they are feeling sad, mad, upset, etc. We encourage our kiddos to express their feelings and tell us how they feel. However sometimes (like us adults) they just need time to themselves first. That's where the safe place comes in. They can look at pictures of their families, practice their breathing techniques, use stress bottles, hug a stuff animal, squeeze a squish fish, or use a book or the feeling wheel to identify how they feel. Sometimes they need a teacher to help them, sometimes they ask a friend to sit with them, and sometimes they come out all on their own. Social-emotional skills are a big part of our program.

We use a kid friendly version of this during planning and recall.

 Dramatic Play:

We ended up switching the two tables seen in this picture. The dramatic play area is very popular and needed more room.

 

 Art:

 Blocks:

 Large Group:

Animal Actions!

 

Tooty-Ta!

 Small Group:

We introduced play dough at small group. We asked the kiddos what we could do with it and they had a TON of ideas. We gave each of them a place mat with their name on it for them to use their play dough on. Many of them decided to use the play dough to create their names.

 

 Toys and Games:

 Outside:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Discovery:

They were really into life cycles this week and putting things in order.

They made up intricate stories about the life cycle families.

While outside we found several bugs and put them in our bug catchers. We brought them inside to look at them closer at discovery. This grasshopper (the kiddos referred to as the "master") only got let out once. ;)

Crickets (the kiddos called these grasshoppers)

Praying mantis and a worm