Welcome Back to School!

Welcome back to school!  We had such a fantastic time learning and playing together today.  This morning we had our preschool A class join us for lots of fun.  We played puzzles and with Starfall.com on the SmartBoard.  We read books about going to preschool and talked about the different fun things we'll get to do in preschool.  We learned the morning routine and talked about how we can wash our hands before snack time.  Each child gets to pour their own water at snack and we had zero spills, fantastic for a first day!

For art we colored our names in our journals and drew a picture of what we did in preschool on the first day of school.

We read The Napping House for math time and talked about the quantity of one.  Each child got their own copy of the book, so be sure to check for it in their backpack and pull it out to read at home.  We also went "fishing" to catch one fish at a time.  The kids were so full of excitement telling me all about the type or color of fish they were able to catch.  We enjoyed talking all about sound in terms of volume during music time and then got to play with all the different instruments.

There is new homework in their backpacks.  Remember that it is completely optional and if you choose to do it you may take as long doing it as you need.  There is no need to return it.  Today's homework is working on the colors red, yellow and blue.  You can sing and color the pages with your child.

This afternoon we had a fantastic preschool B class.  We also started our day with puzzles and playing on the SmartBoard.  Quite a few of the 48 piece puzzles were pulled apart and we worked in teams trying to put them back together.  What great teamwork they all exhibited!  When we sat down to start reading we talked about the most important things that good readers do.  They LOOK at the words, POINT at the letters, MAKE THE SOUNDS of the letters with their mouths, and LISTEN with their ears.  We worked on the letters M, T, A and the sight word "the" today.  Please work at home on those letters and reading their mini reader books (in their binders).  At school we got to practice reading our mini books to our new reading buddies, the sock monkeys.  It seemed to be a hit with the kids. In our encyclopedias we looked through lots of different pages and marked the letters M, T, A and the word "the" with highlighter tape anywhere we could find it.  You could continue that activity at home if you'd like.

 For math we also read The Napping House and talked about the quantity of one through five.  There were two pages that we did in school where we needed to identify how many fingers were held up and then color the same number of items (some kids didn't finish - finish at home if you'd like) and the second page we talked about which items there were 1 of, 2 of, 3 of, and so forth.  After math we moved into music where we explored all the different types of instruments we have in our box and danced around to music.

We also learned to pour our own drinks for snack time and worked on coloring our names and drawing a picture of our first day of school in our journals during art time.  There is new homework in their folder.  It is a focus on red, yellow and blue.  We'll be mixing colors of paint on Wednesday to learn what makes orange, green and purple.

School today was a whirlwind of excitement.  Please holler my way if you have any questions.  It was a fantastic day of learning!