Bird Talk & Autumn Splendor

We started our week with another birthday celebration! We were happy to have Leon’s mom join us with treats and a dinosaur story (of course….dinosaurs are Leon’s absolute favorite!). Happy Birthday Leon!

Fall finally came in full force to North Carolina, and the Ladybugs were loving it this week! It is so much fun to shuffle through the crunchy leaves and throw them in the air! In the classroom, we made leaf rubbings and beautiful leaves to decorate a tree on our wall. We used markers on coffee filter leaves and then gave our hands a workout squirting the leaves with spray bottles to make the colors blend.

We read Wow! Said the Owl. Owl stayed up all day to see the colors of the world in daylight. At the end there was a rainbow, and we discussed how the primary colors blend in the rainbow to make new colors. We used our color paddles and color panels in the sand writing tray to experiment with color mixing.

We also talked about birds other than owls and matched birds to their nest of eggs. Most children recognized a robin or crow, but we discovered a cool bird called a cassowary that has bright green eggs!! Everyone liked those the best. Of course talking about birds at this time of year, we had to sing some turkey songs, too!!

At the end of the week, we began discussing Thanksgiving and created Thanksgiving placemats to bring home for your feast. Some of our friends have even been practicing carving the turkey!! 🤣

reminders:

Monday & Tuesday are school spirit days- wear red, anything with ladybugs, or your CCP shirt to school

The front door will not be accessible on Mon. & Tues., so use your key fob at the back door or come to the door to Ascension Hall by the side parking lot.

School will be CLOSED for Thanksgiving Wed., November 22-Fri., November 24th.

Please mark your calendars to join us (MWF class, too!) on Thursday, december 14th at 9:30 for our Christmas music program.

December 14th will be our last day before Christmas break, and students will be dismissed immediately after the program. Join us as we wish everyone a joyful holiday!

We hope you enjoy your weekend with your sweet Ladybugs!! And Happy Veteran’s Day! We’d like to thank our military families for their service ❤️

Miss Sue, Miss Jenn & Miss Kelsi

Halloween & Fall Fun

The Ladybugs had such a fun, exciting week! We want to thank all of our parents for cheering us on as we paraded in our costumes and for making the day special with treats, crafts and games. You are awesome! We had such spooky snacks-string cheese ghosts and mummy wrapped applesauce were a couple of the favorites! Everyone loved using the Halloween stamps to make pictures. We made masks, scarecrows, and played Bingo and bowling, too.

On Wednesday and Thursday our focus shifted to the Autumn landscape outside with all of the beautiful colors finally showing up on the trees. We read Leaf Man, collected leaves of all colors and shapes, and created our own leaf creatures back in the classroom. We saw so much creativity! On Friday we created a Fall tree in a different way- splat painting!! We dropped paint soaked cotton balls from different heights to create a SPLAT of color on the tree. Some preferred to dot their cotton ball gently and others tried to make a great, big splat!!

We have turned our kitchen into a sandwich shop and have been using menus to place our orders for the chefs. There are smoothies to make at the sandwich shop, too! We will be discussing food & nutriton some more as we approach Thanksgiving.

We also introduced the sand writing tray this week. The sand tray provides a tactile, sensory way to practice pre-writing skills and is a low-stress invitation to writing, especially for children who may usually not show interest in standard writing practice. We added a light pad and color film underneath to make it even more magical!

Reminder- We will be closed next friday, nov. 10th in recognition of veterans day!!

We hope you have a wonderful weekend with your Ladybug!

Miss Sue, Miss Jenn, & Miss Kelsi

Monsters, Spiders & Candy Corn…oh my!

We had a fun week getting ready for Halloween! We painted monsters with giant wiggly eyes on the easel, created spiders & monsters with playdough, and used tissue to make candy corn. The Duck class even made us a candy corn garland to decorate our door. We are thinking of a way to return their kindness- possibly making something for them for Thanksgiving!

In our sensory table, we hunted for spiders and matched the number of spiders in the web to the numerals on the wall. And at circle time we sang The Spooky Wheels on the Bus and Old Macdonald Had a Haunted House. We helped build a monster as we read Go Away Big Green Monster and we played a jack-o-lantern matching game, too.

We really had the best time decorating our pumpkins this week!! Everyone was very creative. Thank you for sending pumpkins for us 🎃

On Wednesday we were super excited to meet the firefighters and go in their truck! They showed us all their tools and reminded us to practice fire drills at home, too.

We also celebrated Lucy’s 4th birthday on Monday. Happy Birthday, Lucy!!! Lucy brought cupcakes to share, and mom read one of Lucy’s favorite books. Many Ladybugs gave Lucy birthday hugs ❤️❤️ It was the sweetest thing ever!

We invite parents to come see our halloween parade at 9:15 on monday & tuesday next week!!

Please dress your child in their costume with clothes underneath. Children are welcome to wear their costumes for our classroom party after the parade, but they may want to take them off later. If you prefer your child take the costume off before we eat, please help them change at the end of the parade.

The weather will be cooler next week- make sure your child’s extra clothes are updated and send a jacket or sweater for the playground, please.

Enjoy this weekend’s warm weather with your Ladybug!!

Miss Sue, Miss Jenn & Miss Kelsi

Big Pumpkin

It was a very quick & busy week in the Ladybug class. Our little friends had so much fun taking a peek inside the Big Pumpkin and feeling the seeds and pulp. So many descriptive words were used as they talked about how it felt- slimy, soft, wet, disgusting, yucky. We also read From Seed to Pumpkin and talked about the pumpkin life cycle. Next week we will be decorating our own small pumpkins. If you haven’t sent in a small pumpkin yet, please send one on Monday or Tuesday this week!!

We used tanagram shapes to make fall pictures during center time. We also used shapes to create firetrucks and practiced identifying the letters in our names on the truck ladders. The Ladybugs took their first shot at using scissors as we cut and ripped paper “fire” to glue onto the letter F. This is a letter that isn’t found much in our friend’s names, so we wanted to bring attention to it during our Fire Safety unit. Everyone was amazed at our candle experiment. We covered a candle to show how it goes out all by itself, because fire needs air to burn. Then we practiced how to Stop, Drop and Roll to put out fire on our clothes.

Our Fire Safety unit will culminate with the fire company visiting on Wednesday, October 25th. We invite our T/TH children to join us at 9:30 in Ascension Hall with a caretaker to meet the firefighters & hopefully get to see their truck!

Next week we will be exploring all things Halloween as we get ready for our big Halloween celebration! We will have a costume parade on October 30th & 31st shortly after dropoff and a party for the children (only) in the classroom afterwards thanks to the wonderful organizing help from our room reps, Erica Gaskins & Kyle Warren. More info has been sent by them to your emails.

Wishing you a wonderful Fall weekend 🎃 🍁

Miss Sue, Miss Jenn, & Miss Kelsi

Fall & Firemen

Fall is finally here and we are loving the weather on our playground! We are ever so grateful for all of the items that our friends have brought to share in our science center- pumpkins, gourds, sticks, acorns, & leaves. We used those science center items to do a Sink or Float experiment this week. Miss Jenn also did a really cool experiment in which she showed us how to use milk to blow “edible” bubbles in an apple cup! We will be doing more with pumpkins in the next weeks and would love for each child to have a small pumpkin to decorate in class, if you could send one along with your child soon!!

October is also Fire Safety Awareness Month. We have begun by adding a burning building and firefighter gear to our dramatic play area. The Ladybugs have been busy saving people and spraying the fire (squeezing those spray bottles is an excellent exercise to strengthen hands for better fine motor skills 😉). We will be learning more about fire safety next week and the fire company will be coming to visit the following week!

We are continuing the study of our names, increasing our literacy skills and letter recognition. This week we concentrated on the first letter of our names. At the easel everyone painted their first letter, and we added tiny stickers to the letter in our journals (MWF class will do this next week, since we ran out of time!).

Thank you all for taking time to meet with me for conferences this week!!! I enjoyed having time to connect and share with each other. It was fun for the kids in each class to get to know both Miss Jenn & Miss Kelsi while I met with you. I know they had a great time together! I will be out again next Thursday & Friday (my husband is having minor surgery), so Jenn will join Kelsi again on Thursday. Then on Friday, Jenn will be traveling to a wedding, so Miss Kelsi will be joined by former Ladybug assistant, Miss Beth. Miss Beth works in the Whale class M-Th, so the children are familiar with her also. I apologize for there being so many changes in our routine these two weeks, but I know our Ladybugs are in capable, loving hands.

On that note, I’d like to ask you all to remember to copy both myself and Jenn (MWF) or Kelsi (T/TH) on any emails you send. We work as a team and it is important for them to know what is going on with the children as well. Thank you!!

Here are some important REMINDERS for the upcoming weeks:

We are closed on Monday (still Fall Break 🍁)

School Pictures will be taken on Wednesday & Thursday this week (Oct. 18th & 19th)

Family Pictures will be available on Saturday, 10/21. Click here to sign up

The fire company will be visiting on Wednesday, October 25th. We invite our T/TH children to join us at 9:30 with a caretaker to meet the firefighters & hopefully get to see their truck!

We will have a costume parade on October 30th & 31st shortly after dropoff and a party for the children (only) in the classroom afterwards thanks to the wonderful organizing help from our room reps, Erica Gaskins & Kyle Warren. More info has been sent by them to your emails.

Enjoy your sweet Ladybugs this weekend!!

Miss Sue, Miss Jenn, & Miss Kelsi

Apples Everywhere!

This week was all about apples. We learned the parts of the apple- skin, flesh, stem, leaf & seeds. We read that apple seeds can be called Pips!! So funny! We also discovered that if you cut the apple’s top off (horizontally), there is a star inside!! And we were being scientists when we examined what happens to the apple flesh once it is cut open. We put 1 piece in water and left one out exposed to air to examine later. By the end of the week one was getting wrinkly and pointy (the children’s descriptive words) and the other was wet, cold and slimy.

We used the apples to make apple print paintings and then used glue sticks to add the leaf and stem to our apple creation. We practiced how to twist the glue to use it and carefully put the top back on so it doesn’t dry out! We are learning to take care of our classroom materials!

Our apple theme extended to our dramatic play area where we pretended to be chefs and baked apple pies. And for math we practiced counting (and subtracting) with our fingers as we sang Way Up High In the Apple Tree, and we graphed who liked each apple product- juice, pie, applesauce or just a plain apple.

Our sensory table is full of cool Fall items to explore. We are strengthening our fingers by using the tweezers to feed acorns to the “squirrels”. Our science trays are full of Fall nature items to examine, too. Thanks to many of you for bringing items to add to the science center!!! We’d love to have some small pumpkins & small gourds to add to the center and use for other activities, too…if you happen to have 1 to spare!!

We had a blast using the parachute to move with the tempo of the music in music class with Miss Vicki this week!

Next week we’ll continue to talk about Fall and explore pumpkins as we move closer to Halloween. The children have already begun telling us about their costumes- perhaps we should share their thoughts with you just in case it doesn’t match what is planned at home!! 🤣

I look forward to meeting with you at conference time next week! Ladybug conferences will be held in the Disciple Room off of Ascension Hall. You will need to ring the bell to come in at that time, but I will try to be on the lookout (there is also a direct entrance into the disciple room to the left of the church front doors, if you’d like to wait there).

REMEMBER:

Miss Jenn & Miss Kelsi will be with the class on Monday & Tuesday.

School will be CLOSED on Friday, Oct. 13th and Monday, Oct. 16th

Picture Day will be on Wednesday, Oct. 18th and Thursday, Oct. 19th

Have a wonderful weekend with your Ladybug!

Miss Sue, Miss Jenn & Miss Kelsi

When September Ends

We’ve come to the end of September already!! Our Ladybugs are forming bonds with each other and feeling confident in the classroom. They know our routines and rules. They’ve been to Chapel and Music Class. We even learned how to do a fire drill!! (everyone lined up so quickly to walk outside to our tree). Now that they are comfortable, we are really starting to see their unique personalities shine! And that is exactly what Pastor Brandon talked about in chapel this week- how we are all unique and special.  He showed the children the unique cross he built out of legos.

This week we continued our discussion of 5 Senses. It was very exciting to watch popcorn explode out of the hot air popper! We used ALL of our senses. We watched it pop out, heard the popping, smelled the popcorn, touched it and, of course, we ate the popcorn!! Yum

We also used our sense of hearing to play Sound Bingo. Everyone had to focus and listen carefully to hear the sounds on the cassette tape (haha….that was an education in itself!) and find the matching picture on the card.

We continued our name study by adding letter beads to our writing table. The children used their name cards to find the letters in their names and make a necklace. We saw some of our Ladybugs helping friends find their letters, too. It makes us so happy to see them showing kindness and being helpful to each other.

In our art center, we introduced watercolor paints at the table and painted with shades of blue at the easel.

And we took advantage of the cooler weather to bring out the bikes during our playground time. I’m happy to say everyone followed the rules to stay safe behind the orange cones. Their legs got a good workout pedaling those big bikes!

Next week we will begin talking about Fall. There will be apples, pumpkins, acorns and more showing up around the classroom. If you are out with your Ladybug and find any signs of Fall (or other interesting nature), bring them to school to add to our science center!!! We would love to examine them with our magnifying glasses or use them in our other activities.

Don’t Forget- Conferences will be October 9th & 10th. If you haven’t signed up and need the link again, just shoot me an email and I’ll resend it. Also, if the times don’t work for you, we can find another time to meet. Miss Jenn & Miss Kelsi will both be in the classroom with the children on those days. They are excited to meet the children from the other class!

Make sure to take a look at our Google photo album, too!

We hope you have a wonderful weekend!

Miss Sue, Miss Jenn & Miss Kelsi

I Have 5 Senses

This week we have been learning about our 5 Senses. We sang a song about what each sense is for and sorted pictures to match the sense that is used. We discovered that some things use more than one sense! For example, you can SEE and HEAR fireworks. We read Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? and we used a mystery box to hide things for our friends & teachers to feel and guess what was hiding.

In addition, we have continued our All About Me/Family study. Everyone has been busy taking loving care of the baby dolls and throwing tea parties in our dramatic play center. We are building our fine motor strength by scooping colored rice and filling up presents and cupcakes liners in our birthday theme sensory table. We can count & add candles to the cupcakes, too. We played with family people in the dollhouse and also sorted the family people by colors. They can make a rainbow!!!

So many children are finding their names at the door all by themselves now! They are feeling confident and know the routine. This week we wrote their names in multiple places on a mural and challenged them to find & color their name wherever they found it on the paper. It was a little trickier without the shape cue that they have at the door or the photo attached to their name cards.

There were a few new things happening in our class this week, too!!! Everyone had a job to do: line leader, door holder, caboose, weather helper, etc. Our class jobs will rotate weekly so that everyone gets a turn to do each job. We were very excited (and maybe a tiny bit nervous) to start our new specials, too.

We had Chapel with Pastor Brandon. He read us a story, taught us about lighting the candles to show God is with us and how to catch the light and carry it with us always. We always sing This Little Light of Mine at the end of Chapel.

We also had our first music class with Miss Vicki. Everyone was very engaged and loved singing, dancing and playing the instruments. Miss Vicki read a story about emotions, challenged us to use our gross motor skills to pretend to be the Little Red Wagon, and introduced us to drums, tambourines, sandpaper blocks & rhythm sticks.

We celebrated Zoe’s birthday this week, too!!! Happy Birthday Zoe!

You should have received an email with a link to sign up for our Fall Conferences. Please let me know if you didn’t get it, or if you need to arrange an alternate time to meet.

We will be having a fire drill next week on Monday & Tuesday. Miss Debbie will just use a bell to keep things very calm- no loud alarm to scare us. We will just be practicing how to line up and go to our safe spot outside quickly.

Enjoy your weekends with your sweet Ladybugs!

Miss Sue, Miss Jenn & Miss Kelsi

Getting to Know You

We’ve had so much fun getting to know our new class this week! We talked about the letters in our names, continued matching letters to our namecards, & found the 1st letter of our names on the chalkboard. We read What I Like About Me and built Mat Man along with the song. Then we drew self-portraits…our first entries in our journals!!

We’ve heard from quite a few parents that our Ladybugs are very tired when they come home from preschool. I can certainly understand why! Everyone has been working so hard to learn our new school routines and rules. In the morning, we move our names to the big ladybug on the door before we go wash our hands and then we wait with a book until all our friends have arrived. Then we can begin our morning meeting by singing Rise & Shine. Here are the words!

Rise & shine and welcome to school today!

Rise & shine and welcome to school today!

Rise & shine and welcome to school today. We’re so glad you’re here!

We begin our meeting at 9:00, so please try to make sure that your child is in the classroom by then, so they can start their day with us this way. It is an important part of building our school community. Chapel and Music start this week, and we will need to be there by 9:15!

Another thing that takes LOTS of practice is standing in a line! With so much practice lining up to wash hands and going to the playground, we are getting better at this every day. We are working on walking safely and holding onto the railing down the steps in our line to go to the playground. So much to learn, but we are smart kids.

Next week we will be talking more about ourselves, our emotions, and about the 5 Senses. I have also decided that our All About Me book would be much more personal if each child made theirs at home with their parents. So…we will be sending home homework next week!! Take a look at the teachers’ All About Me pages that we’ve hung by the classroom door to get an idea of what to do. Let your child color or use stickers, etc to decorate and then add some photos. This book is always one of their most favorite things to look at throughout the year. Thanks for your help!

Reminders-

9/27 & 28 Coffee with Debbie after drop-off

10/9 &10 Conferences- be on the lookout for an email to sign up for your conference!

10/13 & 10/16 Fall Break- NO SCHOOL

We wish you all well & hope you have a great weekend!

Miss Sue, Miss Jenn, & Miss Kelsi

Welcome Ladybugs!

Hello Parents! Welcome to our blog. Every Friday I will be updating you on what we have been doing in class and sharing some pictures from our week. Make sure to follow the link in the email to check out our many photos in the album (remember…our photos are password protected to keep our kids safe. DO NOT copy & share any pictures that include children other than your own, please!).

We had a great time getting to know each other during our small group visitations on Tuesday & Wednesday! We toured the classroom centers, played birthday party in our Dramatic Play center, sang songs, and danced! Everyone was so excited to see ALL their friends, new and old, when we came together on Thursday & Friday. We began learning the classroom routines for cleaning up, coming to circle, and walking in our line to the playground. During center time we colored our faces at the art table. We had fun finding the letters in our names at the writing table, we used paint sticks at the easel, built towns and towers in the block center, and enjoyed scooping and sorting pompoms in our sensory box. We enjoyed the big playground, even though it was VERY hot! Please remember to put on sunscreen and/or bug spray in the morning before school!! Our playground is very sunny.

Next week we will be talking “All About Me” - our favorite things, our families, etc. We will be creating a class book about our friends to keep in our library.

A couple of reminders:

Please label EVERYTHING, especially water bottles & snacks. When you arrive at school, it would be helpful if you can take water bottles & snack out of the backpack & leave it in the cubby for your child to get at snacktime.

We had so much fun meeting everyone & seeing each precious personality begin to shine! We're looking forward to a wonderful year of fun & learning with your beautiful children. Thank you so much for the support you have shown us during this first week! We truly appreciate the donations we have received and all the kind words.

Have a great weekend!

Miss Sue, Miss Jenn & Miss Kelsi

Dinosaurs

It was a very exciting week! Everyone loves dinosaurs!!!! We read about the different types of dinosaurs and learned some lived on land, some in the air, and some in the water. We also learned that sharp-tooth dinos ate meat and plant-eaters had flat teeth, and dinosaurs hatch from eggs. Some of our friends are dino experts and even taught the teachers some of the dinosaur names. There were big vocabulary words being used by our Ladybugs this week, too- paleontologist, fossil, and extinct.

In one of our activities, we used paintbrushes to delicately brush the sand away to find the dinosaurs just like the paleontologists do! It took lots of patience and restraint to do it gently.

We worked on finding the letters in our names while we created a stegosaurus, and we gave him bones. Our new tiny glue bottles give us better control, but we’ve found we really need to use our hand muscles to squeeze that glue out!

It was really funny learning that a dinosaur’s footprint was SO big that we could ALL stand in it together!!!

Because there is so much to learn about dinosaurs and everyone loves them so much, we are going to continue our dinosaur unit next week. We will be doing some fun science experiments and adding some math dinosaur games.

Don’t forget you can sign up for a conference by using the following link:

MWF Class: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0a4eaaa928a4fb6-march2#/

T/Th Class: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0a4eaaa928a4fb6-march3#/

We will be closed on those days (March 13 & 14) so that we have time to speak to you about your marvelous children. We prefer that your child not be present during this time as it can be hard to have a productive conversation with them present. You may want to plan with another parent to watch each others’ children on our playground while one parent goes in for a conference. Thank you for your understanding.

And one last reminder- Please try to be prompt for dropoff & pickup! Some days we have very little time to have our morning greetings meeting before we head out of the room for another activity & we hate to start without all of our friends present. At the end of the day, the teachers have to clean up the classroom & sometimes have meetings when school ends. Our class schedules are currently:

MWF class- 9:10-12:10 Monday & Friday and 9:10-1:00pm on Wednesday

T/Th class- 9:10-12:10 on Tuesday and 9:10-1:00pm on Thursday

Thank you so much for your cooperation :)

We wish you a sunny & happy weekend!!

Miss Sue, Miss Jennifer & Miss Beth