Fall Fun

UPCOMING EVENTS:

FIRE DRILL & CHAPEL HILL FIRE VISIT- We will practice a fire drill next week. Then the firefighters will be coming on Oct. 12th at 9:15 to teach us about fire safety and show us their truck!

CONFERENCES take place on October 13th & 14th. We look forward to chatting with you about your child’s first weeks of school. Each conference will be about 20 minutes. Ms. Carina will be teaching with a sub in the classroom with the children, and I will be meeting with you across the street in the church office building at 105 Market Street. If you haven’t signed up, here is the link: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/5080B4CAEAA2DA5F94-66089991-2026

TEACHER’S PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT- School will be closed on Friday, Oct 16th

FALL PHOTOS - The Yellow Ducks photo day is scheduled for Tuesday, October 20th with photographer David Gellatly outside under the bell tower.

HALLOWEEN- The Yellow Ducks will join the Blue Whales for a Halloween parade around Southern Village on Thursday, October 29th shortly after arrival time. More details coming soon.

YELLOW DUCK NEWS

We’d like to have the children decorate pumpkins together this month. Please send in a small (pie sized) pumpkin by Friday.

Our Yellow Ducks are really building a close community quickly! Everyone loved having lunch together this week. There was lots of conversation and helping hands (those wrappers can be very tricky, but our friends help each other out ❤️). We see them showing kindness to their new friends every day and beginning to learn to solve their disagreements peacefully. It is wonderful!

This week the Ducks went on a shape hunt around the classroom and drew the shapes they found on their clipboards. This class really enjoys a scavenger hunt! They have also been hunting for the hidden rubber ducky every day. I think letter hunts are in their future 😉.

We welcomed Fall with the collection of items brought by our friends growing every day. We used black crayons to make leaf rubbings and painted them with watercolors. We read about apples, examined their properties with our 5 senses, and even made our own “apple pies” to eat with lunch on Wednesday. Everyone smashed & smooshed a bag of graham crackers into crumbs for the crust, scooped gooey pie filling on top, got a squirt of whipped cream and sprinkled cinnamon on. Everyone enjoyed making apple print paintings as well.

This week we completed our first cycle of our literacy curriculum. We celebrated each child’s name and the letters in it. Our Ducks are very proud to know the letters in their names!! During our next cycle we will be introducing a letter and its sound (along with a corresponding movement) each day. Once we have cycled through the entire alphabet, we will be going into a more in depth study of each letter.

Thank you all for donating our wish list items this past month. We are still in need of some water wipes for quick cleanups during some of our messier activities. If you are curious, our class also has an Amazon wish list! The items on this list are “wants”, not “needs”, but would be wonderful additions to our play and learning. https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/2GHEXHLIX551O?ref_=wl_share

We will also keep a QR code to this list on the board outside our classroom, as it gets updated throughout the year 😊

Have a wonderful weekend with your sweet Ducks!

Miss Sue & Miss Carina

My Body & Senses

UPCOMING EVENTS:

LUNCH BUNCH BEGINS on Monday (and Wed.)!

FALL BREAK is next week! School will be closed on October 1st & 2nd (Thursday & Friday)

FIRE DRILL & CHAPEL HILL FIRE VISIT- We will practice a fire drill sometime during the week after Fall Break. Then the firefighters will be coming on Oct. 12th at 9:15 to teach us about fire safety and show us their truck!

CONFERENCES take place on October 13th & 14th. We look forward to chatting with you about your child’s first weeks of school. Each conference will be about 20 minutes. Ms. Carina will be teaching with a sub in the classroom with the children, and I will be meeting with you across the street in the church office building at 105 Market Street. Here is the link to the sign-up: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/5080B4CAEAA2DA5F94-66089991-2026

TEACHER’S PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT- School will be closed on Friday, Oct 16th

FALL PHOTOS - The Yellow Ducks photo day is scheduled for Wed., October 20th with photographer David Gellatly outside under the bell tower.

HALLOWEEN- The Yellow Ducks will join the Blue Whales for a Halloween parade around Southern Village on Thursday, October 29th shortly after arrival time. More details coming soon.

Lunch Bunch

On Monday we will have our first Lunch Bunch.  Please label your child’s snack & lunch and pack them separately.  We ask that you continue to put their snack in their cubby and just leave their lunch in their backpack. Please remember to pack a nut and sesame free lunch and snack and include any needed utensils, napkin and water bottle.

Lunch will be every Monday and Wednesday and pick up will be inside at 1:00. Some of our friends may not be ready for a longer day and that’s ok! If you feel that your child isn’t ready for lunch bunch, feel free to pick them up at 12pm - they can always join us at any point during the year!

YELLOW DUCK NEWS:

We started our week with a fun visit from 2 former Duck students. Jacob’s sister, Lucy, and her friend, Reese- both 1st graders now- read us stories at circle time. It was such a treat to hear them READING!! I think our little Ducks were inspired by these big kid role models! Some day soon, they will be able to read, too.

We had our first chapel and music class this week. Everyone did well following our new routine.

We have been talking about what makes each of us special, our likes and dislikes, families, etc. This week we learned about our physical bodies- muscles, veins, heart, lungs and brain. We discussed our 5 senses and used those senses to describe popcorn. We sang Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes and Where is Thumbkin? and used our big muscles to sit & spin and do yoga. It was fun making our own puppets, too, and putting on a show for our friends!

Next week we will talk about signs of Fall and make an apple treat. If your child has, or finds, an item related to the Fall season, we’d love for them to bring it and display it on our science shelf!
Enjoy the beautiful weather with your sweet Ducks!

Miss Sue & Miss Carina

Getting to Know You

Everyone was excited about getting jobs this week. We will rotate jobs at the beginning of each new week. By the end of the year everyone will have had 2 turns at each job. Our Lucky Duck gave us some great clues about the special item she brought in for Guess & Tell. Haydon guessed that it was a bunny on the last clue! It was very special to June because she has had it since birth. She kindly let everyone give Boppy bunny a pet and a snuggle.

This year we will be cycling through the alphabet as we learn the letters, phonetic sounds, and early literacy skills. To begin we are introducing a child’s name each day, revealing one letter at a time, singing a little tune about the name, building it and adding it to our Letter Wall. Your child’s name is usually the first word they can read and the most important (and exciting!) to them. The Yellow Ducks are very proud to come up and spell their names for us!

International Dot Day was on Tuesday. To celebrate we covered our room in sticky note dots and used dot markers at the easel! We also read the book, “The Dot”. Its beautiful message to children is that wherever they are with their art, it is a masterpiece. Just make your mark and remember to sign your masterpiece just like any famous artist would. We showed examples of different types of lines and shapes as inspiration. You can view their masterpieces in our hallway gallery!

We also drew the first in a series of self-portraits that we will do throughout the year. We talked about what makes each of us unique, then used sharpies on lamination sheets to trace photos of our faces and add details. We will save the portraits to keep in their portfolios to be sent home at the end of the year.

Our first math focus has been shapes. We took turns playing shape bingo this week. It was also an exercise in patience waiting for the specific colored shape on each game board to be pulled from the deck!

Our Yellow Ducks are getting the hang of the routines and expectations at school as well as navigating friendships. We talked about what makes a good friend and kindness in general. We have seen a lot of new friendships forming ❤️

Next week we will begin to have Chapel on Wednesday with Pastor Lee, and Music on Thursday with Miss Crysta-Anne.

Have a fantastic weekend with your sweet Ducks. Stay cool!

Miss Sue & Miss Carina

Our First Week

Hello Yellow Duck Families,

It was just wonderful to see our Yellow Duck friends together in our classroom this week. Each one of them did an amazing job of dealing with the big task of saying goodbye to their families and a new beginning with their teachers. Any first day nerves disappeared very quickly and each one of our Yellow Duck friends had a great time exploring their new classroom and saying hello to some new friends.

Classroom Jobs:

Each week every child will be assigned a job in our classroom. Our jobs help to build community and a sense of responsibility within our class family. One special job is to be the Lucky Duck. Each week the Lucky Duck will be invited to share what we call a Guess & Tell. On Mondays we will notify you if your child is the Lucky Duck for the week. They can bring in ONE item hidden in a bag or box (or a photo of the item in an envelope, if it is too large) on Tuesday. Help them think of 3 clues about the item (you can write them down to help your child remember). Your child will tell us the clues at circletime, and we will guess what they brought to show! This is a great exercise in public speaking that will help build your child’s confidence as well as bring them joy in sharing what is special to them!

Other jobs include line leader, door holder, wish well helper, prayer leader, calendar & weather helpers and more. Everyone will have a job, and they will rotate through the list 2-3x through the year.

This week our Yellow Ducks had fun making cakes and pretending it was their friends’ birthdays in the dramatic play center. They enjoyed rolling, squishing and cutting playdough & made duck pictures at the tables. At our math center we had tanagram shape puzzles. And the writing area was a big hit with pens and notepads.

After reading Pete the Cat Rockin’ in His School Shoes we graphed the colors of our shoes & did our 1st writing as we attempted to write our names to add to our own Guess Who’s Shoe book! (to be published next week 😉). We are learning our new friends’ names as we sing the Hello song each morning, and everyone decorated the 1st letter of their names to hang on the board in the hall by the office.

We hope you have a restful weekend with your little Duckies. It has been a busy week!

Miss Sue & Miss Carina

Welcome Yellow Duck Parents!

Thank you for coming to our playdate and orientation this week! It was so nice meeting everyone and putting faces to names. We are excited about the upcoming year in the Duck class and can tell there is going to be lots of energy and fun!

Here are the highlights from my Orientation Night presentation:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mfP6d3MEMXEfNp9EpSiccqT968M2KOaY/export?format=pdf

Save the PDF to reference throughout the year (it will also be accessible on the website by scrolling back to this blog post)!!

Each day you will be able to see new updated photos from our classroom. Just go into the CCP website, enter the password to the Parent Portal (CCP-26/27), go into the Yellow Duck class page & click the classroom photo button. Looking at these photos with your child is a great way of stimulating conversation about school, feelings and friendships. Alternatively, at the end of every blog that is sent to your email on Friday, is a “read on” button. PRESS IT! You will be able to see the blog in its entirety, including the photo link, that way.

Blog notes:

~ If you want to contact me through the emailed blog, please use the “click here to email Sue directly” button. If you don’t use that button and just hit reply, Ms. Shelly ends up getting the email and then has to forward it to us.

~Please always remember that some families have elected to not share their children’s image publicly. If you download a photo from our album or take photos during a school event that include children other than your own, please do not share it via social media or any other public venue. Please pass this information on to anyone you might privately share photos with (ie. grandparents). Thank you for respecting our families and their privacy.

We are looking forward to working in partnership with your family to make this a great school year for your little Duck!

Miss Sue & Miss Carina