Early Pre-K Adventures!

Dear Parents,

We hope this blog finds you well! We’re very excited to showcase the creative and engaging activities that helped our young learners this week on their educational journey. As a reminder, next week on Thursday (September 26) we will have an early dismissal at 12pm for Demera, the traditional Ethiopian holiday. We will also be having a celebration starting 11am, including a bonfire and more fun! Further information on that will be coming out soon. The following Friday (September 27) the school will be closed for the holiday as well.

Happy Birthday Nina

Large group

Lately in our class we have being learning about colors, which the children love! This week our large group story was about a chameleon and color changing titled ‘The Mixed-up Chameleon’. As for morning messages, there was an exciting scavenger hunt for the colors green and blue. Furthermore, we reviewed the five senses all together.

This week’s most requested song was ‘Ram, Sam, Sam’. This song really helped us review some body parts vocabulary and we got to work on our gross motor skills through it also!

Early Pre-K this week learned about the sound ‘c’, practicing words that begin with this sound. We also explored the square shape describing its characteristics and worked on recognizing the color green. Lastly, we introduced the number 3, using fun counting activities to reinforce the concept.

"Square has four sides" Liyat

"Nose we smell" Kian

Science:

For science we continued on with the topic we started last week ‘Five senses’ focusing on tasting, looking and hearing. For tasting we prepared sugar, salt, lemon and banana. Before we started tasting we talked about the body part that helps us taste, which is our tongue. Then the children started tasting and describing the taste of each.

“Lemon sour” Shishani

“Sugar sweet like chocolate” Kian

After that, for hearing we put different sounds on the speaker and the children had fun guessing if it is a sound of an animal or a musical instrument.

“Duck” Samuel

Finally, we wrapped up our session by discussing sight, through asking everyone what they can see around them.

“I see a phone” Nina

“I see blue” Ismael

Library

In our recent library session, we enjoyed reading a delightful book about Clifford’s birthday party. The story of Clifford celebrating his big day helped the children understand the concept of birthdays and how they relate to the months of the year. After reading we talked about how each child has a special month for their own birthday.

It was a fun way to connect the story to meaningful learning activity, reinforcing the idea of time, months and special celebrations.

Literacy

Based on the children’s request from before, we did the activity of matching objects with their beginning sounds. We started off by going through zoo phonics (o-z) then laid them on the floor. After that we named the different objects together and one by one students came to front chose and objects and matched it with the beginning sound. It was not only educational but also very fun!

Art:

This week art session allowed our class to explore the sense of touch while creating a fun and personal piece of art. We started by having everyone trace their hand on a piece of paper. Then we put out different kinds of materials that have different texture such as seeds, cotton, ribbon, pom pom and rope.

Each child picked the materials they wanted to stick on the hand they traced earlier. The whole class was having fun putting glue, sticking the materials they chose and describing how it feels!

“Five fingers” Riley

Gymnastic

In our gymnastic session we started warming up by walking, jogging and running around in a circle, which helps coordination and balance. After everyone was prepared, we started doing a rolling activity where we rolled our bodies sideways across the mat. While the children rolled, they were also moving small balls from one side to the other.

They were not only rolling but also concentrating on maintaining the grip on the ball!