February-Love and Friendship

On Monday we'll begin a new month centering on feelings and friendship. This is such a great month to discuss how to be a good friend, what that entails, what that looks like for a preschool child and how it feels to have a friend. We'll be doing some role playing to show first hand how to ask a friend to play with you and how to take turns and play together. Along with role playing we will read books on the subject to illustrate how different characters deal with friends and we can learn from them. We wil discuss feelings and different emotions and what those emotions look like.

Just a reminder:

• Our Valentine's Party is coming up and we'll be sending home information about that.
• Swimming starts on Wednesday, February 10th for the Red Room and Wednesday, February 24th for the Green Room.
• Monday, February 15th-school is closed for President's Day

New Schedule

We will be starting a new schedule in the afternoon. While some of our students are napping the other students from both preschool classsrooms joined together and played. Starting on Monday the nappers will be in the green room and we will be dividing the students into groups in the red room. These groups will travel to different planned stations that we have prepared for them. We have named the stations to help identify the area where the children will move to and we will change that as we change our theme in the classroom. We will be start with these stations:

• The polar bears will be meeting in the play area.


• The barn owls will be meeting at the large table where we will play with a variety of mediums over the week such as play-doh, shaving cream and clean mud.


• The hares will be working on the computer for half of the time and the other half they will have a variety of art experiences such as free art, watercolor and stamping.


• The penguins will be meeting in the circle area for a variety of stories, fingerplays and songs throughout the week. This is an area that we are using to prepare our students that will be attending kindergarten next year.

We are excited about our new adventure!

We made clean mud this week and the children had a fun time mixing up the ingredients, tearing the toilet tissue and grating the ivory soap! Here's the recipe in case you wanted to try it at home.

4 bars of Ivory soap

6 rolls of toilet tissue

4 cups of water.

Grate the 4 bars of soap in a bowl. Tear up the toilet tissue and add it to the soap. Add 4 cups of water and mix with your hands until it's smooth. You can store it in a plastic container or a plastic bag and it will stay good for a long time. Enjoy and have fun with it!

So Much to Learn!

Our preschool week was filled with learning the letter C and we concentrated on just learning the /k/ sound that it makes. We looked at objects around the room that we gathered that would help the children understand the sound. Some of the items we used were couch, cards, cup, cap, and comb. We also began learning our numerals and counting one item around the room.



With the snow that was on the ground we continued to learn about seasons and what we might see in the wintertime such as snowflakes, mittens, snowmen and sleds. In the green room they made pretend snow and the children were able to play with that in the sensory table and they also practiced their letters in shaving cream! In the red room we played with real snow in the sensory table and added items such as cups, spoons and water to see how that made the snow any different.



Many stories were read this week on how animals live in the winter time. We also read stories about people in the winter and fun stories about making snowman.

Please remember that tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and we won't be having preschool so we'll see you on Tuesday, January 19th!

A Snowy Start!

This has been quite a week back from Christmas vacation with one snow day, one late start and one early dismissal! The children did a great job adjusting to all of the changes that the week brought and we'll be carrying over the letter C, positional words and the theme of animals in winter. We'll start to work on numbers, taking one number per week, and this week we'll start with the number 1.

We will be making clean mudd this week which is a great mixture of grated ivory soap, ripped up toilet paper and water. With this clean smelling mixture we can make some great winter scenes and mold and shape ice cream cones, snowman and a zillion other shapes!

The only scheduled day off from school in the month of January is next Monday, January 18th. Brooks-Yates school will be closed for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.