November Pre-School Newsletter
We can not believe that November is already here!
October was a fun and spooky month, the children had fun decorating the classroom for Halloween, learning Fire Safety from Firefighter Dave, and the Carnival was a great success! Our small groups are moving along great, we are all learning about shapes, colors, numbers and letters and working on our fine motor skills.
We have decided to change our November theme to “The First Thanksgiving”. We will be learning all about Pilgrims, Native Americans, what children played with and how they dressed at the First Thanksgiving. We will also be making our own butter, ink and pots. It should be a fun and exciting month! If there is anything that you would like to add to our month please let a teacher know.
The V.I.P ‘s for the month of November are:
Week of 11/2- Ava Z
Week of 11/9- Charlotte and Brett
Week of 11/16 – Christopher and Chloe P
Week of 11/30 – Connor
The letters of the week are: 11/2-C, 11/9-O, 11/16-Q ,11/22-G
We have a sign up for parents to come in and read a story, we would love to have you in. Story time in the morning is 11:40 and in the afternoon 3:45.
IMPORTANT REMINDERS: We will be closed Veterans Day, which is Wednesday, November 11. We will also be closed Thursday, Thanksgiving Day and the Friday following. AND it is getting cold, please remember warm coats, hats and mittens and please label them. Thank You , Your Preschool Team.. Gobb

November News Upstairs Class

            The Halloween Carnival was a great success and it was such fun seeing all of our Upstairs Friends in costume!  October brought many pumpkin activities into our classroom including tear art pumpkins, chalk pumpkins, pumpkins on a vine stamping and seed collection.  We also explored acorns, straw/hay painting, cut and paste witches and skeleton bone writing!  Be sure to ask your child about what art choices he/she makes each day and what materials he/she is exploring.

In the Pre-K our HWT focus was on capital letters, E, L, F, and H and their correct formation as well as sound.  We continue to stress proper stroke sequence and starting our letters at the “top, top, top.”  Your child will be familiar with “big line, little line, big curve and little curve” which are used to make each letter of the HWT alphabet as well as our familiar friend, Mat Man.  When working with your child on writing at home it is important to remind your child to start the capital letters at the top and it will be helpful if you also use the vocabulary we use at school when writing capital letters.  If your child is still hesitant with the writing of his/her name we encourage you to practice daily with a white board, a chalk board, crayons or even their fingers in the sand!  A variety of mediums is appealing and makes the practice fun!

Our Pre-K groups; Alligators, Caterpillars and Bumblebees, rotated through a wide variety of patterning, sorting, writing and rhyming activities this month.  The teachers have seen a tremendous amount of growth in the class and are very pleased to see how much learning is taking place each day.  The children are good at sorting a wide variety of objects and are able to make several different patterns and use their words to describe the patterns with support.  Sorting Halloween candy is a fun, family activity that was modeled in class in conjunction with the story, Harriet’s Halloween Candy.  Sorting by size, color and favorites was practiced and then we graphed our results.  If your child tries this at home please encourage him/her to bring in the results (but please leave the actual candy at home :)!

The Kindergarten class reinforced a lot of their reading skills during October.  We are working on breaking down words by phonemes, which is very useful when learning to read.  The children are doing really well recognizing basic sight words in sentences.  The class is almost ready for more concrete math – we are still working on correct number writing as well as number sequencing.  The children have worked hard on learning odd & even numbers and skip counting by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s.  Our field trip to the farm this month was a lot of fun!!  The children were fascinated by the sunflowers!  The hayride was a huge hit as well seeing all the cows and pumpkins.  During November, we will be using our reading, writing and math skills as we learn all about the 13 Colonies.   I am hoping each child will be able to name almost all of the original 13 Colonies by the end of the month.

November will bring a study of the 13 Colonies to our classroom as well as a study of Thanksgiving.  Each child is learning to sing “The 50 States” song and “The Oceans Song” in our classroom.  Using music is a wonderful way to learn new material and many children are already able to name/sing the first 20 states in alphabetical order!

We encourage any parent who would like to read a special story to our class to speak with an Upstairs Teacher and schedule a time to come in.  We generally do our story time at 10:15 and 2:15.  We are so very thankful for your support!

Reminders:

·         We are a NUT FREE school – no candy w/ nuts may be brought to RHS

·         Hats and mittens are important for our playground.  Please assist your child to put the mittens into the hat and the hat into their coat sleeve each day and not pack the hat and mittens into the bottom of the backpack

·         Slippers are always welcome so that boots can stay in the closet!