February Fun in Pre K

Dear parents,

We hope this blog finds you well! We have had a fantastic week in Pre K. Since it’s the beginning of a new month, in this week’s blog we will be recapping our week, as well as the month at large. Starting with this week, we had some exciting new activities, continued working on our projects, and continued to deepen our knowledge of the topics we have already been exploring. In terms of the month overall, February has been filled with exciting days like the 100 day celebration, celebrating friendships, birthdays, and more! The kids have been preparing for some exciting events coming up such as a football match, family day, and more.

February Recap

In science in February, the kids focused on concepts about food, nutrition, gardening, and what happens when you mix materials (chemistry). They are still watering and checking in on their bean plants, and the plants are growing so nicely! In math, we worked on addition with various materials and activities. We also talked a lot about numbers during our 100 day celebration preparation, and briefly touched on large numbers, which is a topic they really liked and we plan on doing more of in the coming weeks. In literacy, the kids have been working together putting sounds into full words, continuing with letter and sound recognition, and reading! For specials, we had lots of fun in our usual gymnastics, Ethiopian center, and innovation center.

The kids got busy in art, completing several canvases with different themes collaboratively, as well as working on their own sketches and drawings. Moreover, they have been really enjoying their time working with clay and this past month all demonstrated incredible artistic skills and teamwork when they worked together on making an airplane sculpture! It’s truly a pleasure to watch their craft take flight.

This month, we also had a new addition to our large group time which was class helpers! Every day, we assign 3 or 4 students to be our helpers for the day. Helpers are in charge of leading the class through our circle time center, reading and writing what is on the whiteboard for the day, and counting the caterpillar. Other responsibilities of the helpers include making sure that we clean up after activities, and seeing if anyone needs extra help or materials and informing the teachers of that. The kids are showing so much responsibility and consideration, and we can’t wait to continue seeing our helpers thrive!

Our week in Pre K

We want to wish a very happy birthday to Abigael and Aiden! We had a lovely time celebrating together with cake, balloons, party hats and more!

Large group

This week, we had a great time in large group! We continued on our routines with songs, learning beginning and ending sounds and so on as well as continuing with our class helpers system! Each day, we assign 3 kids to be our helpers for the day. The kids absolutely love this and are so responsible in completing their tasks! We look forward to continuing to see our amazing helpers.

Cooperative game

This week, we had yet another exciting and lively time doing a cooperative game! Since the last time we played it was such a hit, we decided to do Math Musical Numbers/”Freeze!” again. In this game, the teacher goes around the room setting up dots of various colors. Each kid stands on a dot, and once the music starts they dance around the room and when they hear “freeze” they find a dot to stand on. The teacher turns their back to the group and says a color, and whoever is standing on that color has to go and sit to the side until the next round of the game. We repeat the process until there is only one dot left. Then, we played another variation of the game where we have numbers on the dots and the teacher calls out a number with their back turned, keeping the rest of the process the same. The kids had so much fun doing this, and we can see their number and color recognition improving a lot!

Literacy

This week in literacy, the kids worked on their journals. In this session, we had a simple drawing on the board. Before the kids started in their journals, we asked them what the beginning and ending sounds of the drawing on the board is. Then, we had each kid draw something in response to the prompt on the board or something else we’ve been doing in class. They made such amazing entries and we are so proud of their creativity! They also worked on some zoophonics worksheets, which they were very engaged with and enjoyed a lot! We split the class in 3 groups, and gave each group a worksheet with an interactive activity involving one of the zoophonics letters. Then, after each group was done with their first worksheet, they got the next one and so on until every group had a chance with each worksheet. Then, we talked about what words we could make out of the three letters we discussed. The kids are improving so much on their recognition of sounds and words, and we are so proud of them!

Science

This was a fruitful week in science. The kids continued to build upon the topic of plants and nutrition, which we have been discussing for some time now. First, we did another fun vegetable identification worksheet, which we tied in with our work in literacy by asking kids to tell us the beginning and ending sound of each vegetable once they stated what the vegetable is called. Then, we did a similar naming activity with some of our toy animals, and subsequently had a really fun and insightful discussion about the different habitats they might live in, what a habitat is, what kinds of habitats they’re familiar with, and so on.