Our Spirit Week is finally happening!!! Here is the list of events this week:

Monday, Feb 23rd– Silly Socks Day -wear your silly (or mismatched) socks

Tuesday, Feb 24th– Team Tuesday (wear your favorite team’s gear)

Wednesday, Feb 25th- wear your PJs for Pancakes in Pajamas!

Thursday, Feb 26th- Glow in the Dark Day (wear white or neon clothing- we will supply glow sticks, etc at school).

Friday, Feb 27th- Freaky Friday (go wild with crazy clothes combos or crazy hair…or both!)

UPCOMING EVENTS:

Sunday, March 1 at 8:45 -Preschool Sunday. Your children will sing some special songs near the beginning of the 9:00 worship service and we will celebrate the CUMC Preschool Ministry. Please arrive at 8:45

March 11 & 12 - Conferences - A sign up genius link was emailed to you on Monday for you to sign up for a conference time. School is closed for spring conferences, but our playground is always open! Feel free to plan with another parent to watch each others’ children on the playground during your conference times. We ask that you please come without children to conferences so that we can have a private conversation about your student’s progress.

March 30 - April 6 - Spring Break!

Thank you all for joining us for Donuts with Grownups! We hope you felt loved by your sweet Ducks and enjoyed spending a moment in the classroom with them.

All throughout this month we have been discussing our communities. We have talked about the towns each of us live in, the jobs that people do around town, and ways to move around town (transportation). This week our loft turned from doctor’s office to dentist’s office with the addition of a special hippo patient that Aubrey brought to share with the class! It was also fun playing letter Bingo by erasing the “cavity” letters from teeth as the letters were called. We even had some new “teachers” leading circle time for the dinosaurs 🤣

In our sensory table we floated boats & attempted to balance people in them. We also decorated sailboats that we will try to race in the baby pools next week! There was lots of block building including roads and street signs to direct the traffic on the carpet. And it was very exciting painting at the easel with a drill (a paintbrush was taped to the drill)! It made really cool swirly patterns.

Next week, weather permitting, we plan to take a neighborhood walk to expand on our community discussion. Please send your child in comfortable walking shoes on Monday (along with their silly socks 🤪).

At the beginning of the year each child drew a self portrait. Mid-year we like to re-evaluate that skill with another self portrait. This time we thought back to when we made symmetrical snowflakes & noticed how faces are also symmetrical. Everyone then worked with a photo of half of their face to draw the symmetrical side. It was a challenge. Many wanted to draw a whole face on the blank side of their paper. We used erasers for the first time, so we could go back and change things to make them match on both sides. It’s ok to make mistakes and revisions! I like to remind our young Ducks that they are doing their work just like a 4 yr old…and that’s perfect. We are here to learn & grow together. I think everyone was pretty proud of themselves when they were done!

I’ll tell you another thing that they should all be very proud about- this week Miss Vicki began teaching the 4 yr olds how to play handbells. These are not jingle bells. They are color coded & child sized handbells that require special technique and effort to play them correctly. The Yellow Ducks listened attentively to the instructions and were able to play their bells as their colors were called- one hand holding the bell & the other resting behind their back. Miss Vicki has a special song planned for them to learn once they master the technique.

There is one last thing that I’d like to share with you this week. During our letter writing time one of the children noticed that our wipe off markers say Amazon on them. “Aha!! You are reading!”, I said. We talked about recognizing familiar words in the world around us. This is called environmental print. The next day I pulled out pictures of familiar environmental print—Band-Aid, Walmart, Exit, Lego, Paw Patrol—and students then came up and “read” it in the sentence frame: I can read ___. No, they aren’t decoding. This is preschool. The goal isn’t independent reading yet. The goal is building the foundation that makes reading possible. In this lesson, children are learning that print carries meaning, words are read left to right and top to bottom, and words are made up of letters. They begin to understand that the same word looks the same every time you see it, and that environmental print connects language to the real world. They’re building confidence, oral language, visual discrimination, and one-to-one matching between spoken and printed words. Environmental print helps children realize they already recognize words—and that print is everywhere.