UPCOMING EVENTS:

CHAPEL HILL FIRE VISIT- The firefighters will be coming on Monday, 10/12 at 9:15 to teach us about fire safety and show us their truck!

CONFERENCES take place on October 13th & 14th. I look forward to chatting with you about your child’s first weeks of school. Each conference will be about 15-20 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 in the conference room (on the right as you enter from that parking lot).

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 PARADE on Thursday, OCT., 29TH- We hope you can join us for our Halloween Costume Parade around Southern Village. Please send your child to school in their costume and drop them off at the classroom at our usual 9:00 a.m. The Yellow Ducks will meet families outside in front of the church at 9:25 a.m. and start our parade with the Blue Whales class. Families are welcome to dress up too. Please help your child change out of their costume after the parade before you leave. If you are OK with them wearing their costume all day (and they will be able to move & function) that is fine too, but we will be our normal messy selves and play outside that day. We will party with the children in our classroom with treats & activities after the parade. More info to come soon on how to contribute to our party. We appreciate your help!

YELLOW DUCK NEWS

We are continuing to talk about Autumn. The Ducks enjoyed creating leaves & apples with stencils on the easel. We also created beautifully colored leaves with sprayed markers & glitter glue.

Now that we had some cooler weather on the playground, we brought out some more active equipment- hockey sticks and bikes! These activities challenged coordination and required large motor strength. Did you know that the large muscle movements of the trunk, shoulders, and neck provide the foundational stability and posture that children need before the smaller muscles in their hands and fingers can control a pencil?

We challenged those fine motor skills as we practiced writing our names this week, too. Learning to recognize their name in print is the 1st step we work on in preschool (these Ducks had that mastered before they came to us!). Then children learn to rote spell their name, differentiate & identify each individual letter, and finally write the letters. Most of our Ducks can rote spell their names when asked. However, some may still struggle to identify the individual letters and write them correctly. In our “Trace, Build, Write” activity each child followed the guidelines (starting at the red dot at the TOP) to trace the letters, then they built their name gluing on letter squares in the correct order, and finally wrote their names independently!

Thank you all for remembering to bring in pumpkins this week! The class will be decorating them on Wednesday (many of the Ducks have been anxiously waiting). I also want to thank the Archers for donating some toys from our wish list including new letter beads that we had fun using this week! We had fun hunting for letters on the table and in the murky colored water in our sensory bin!