Pre-k and Kindergarten

Greeting parents,

What a two great weeks passed! We want to apologize for not sending last week's blog; we had an Internet problem. After the family event, Christmas has been the talk of the week! We are talking about things we wanted to do, and there has been an interesting conversation about how they want to do snowman in the school using a box and paint it white. And the other interesting suggestion was bringing snow from a snowy place to make the snowman! So if you happen to know any snowy place where we could get snow for our snowman, give pre-k and Kindergartens a call!! There are many more interesting conversations; if you stick around for the next blog, we will be happy to share with you all.

Quick Appreciation

We want to take this time to thank all the families for coming to the Family Day and also for you kind donations you have made for Birhan Lezare School. From the comments we get, we will try to prepare events like this in the near future.

Large group this week

As we tried to mention earlier, we had a long talk about Christmas. We love how expressive they are, confident to share what’s in their minds, and always try their best to develop a plan for any events. The book “The Sneetches” by Dr. Seuss got our groups attention this week. There is a story that talks about a pant without a body, “What was I scared off?” and it was really interesting to see them trying to come up with a storyline by looking at the pictures. We are still working on our calendars, and the new thing we introduced them to is, ‘Discovering words” which we bring different letters for each day, and we ask them words that start with that letter. Since we all are in Christmas vibe, we talked about what they want for Christmas this year; well, we want to give you all a heads up, so here are their wishes,

Alia: “I want a new toy because my little brother broke some of them and I also need a tennis Tshirt!”

Yamlak: “I want a lion, tiger, batman, Spiderman, spider and bubble!”

Ezana: “ I want Christmas tree and bubble!”

Nathaneil: “I want superhero’s present!”

Victor: “ I want Ambulance, police car and batman

Aaizaaz: “I want a toy racing car!”

You all are welcome!

Small group last week and this week.

The letter hunters: last week for our literacy class, we divided the Pre-k and Kindergarteners, where the Pre-ks continued with beginning sounds with flashcards. It is a very simple activity were you could do with your child. Writing CVC words were very simple for kindergarteners; they mastered the beginning and ending sounds. We are working on middle sounds in our large group to help them more. This week, they matched pictures with beginning and ending sounds.

Game lovers: some of our friends in our group still need help listening to some instructions so we used a cooperative game to help them understand more. This week, we used musical dots and assigned each dot to some instructions and every time we pick the dots they have to do the action; it turned out we need to use dots all the time so they can listen!! It was a really good activity, one of our friends come up with an instruction where we have to shake our “bum bum”.

One of our plans for Christmas is to make ornaments from Tuesday-Friday; we focused on doing more Christmas ornaments for our big Christmas tree by the swing area and also snowman. We used paper Mache, paints, cards, pegs, and pipe cleaners and made different ornaments.

Pizza makers: this week for Math, they had a chance to make a “pizza” using numbers. We made a circular shape using the box and wrote different numbers, 1-20 for Pre-k and 20-35 for kindergarteners. We made dots using paper so they can count them and match them with the numbers. They finally pretend to eat it later on!

What is that smell: last week we have been exploring a sense of hearing and a sense of touching. This week we had the chance to explore with a sense of smell and sense of sight. Children need to learn through practice where they can discover things on their own; that is when they start to develop their confidence and communication skill.

After we talked about what they understand about sight and smell, we proceed to the first activity, which was a sight. We used a Popsicle stick and stick a ring on top of it; we ask the children to close one eye and try to put a pencil through the ring. The other fun activity we had was sense of smell as they tried to smell different fruits blindfolded! We had a banana, strawberries, and orange, we cut each of them and asked them what they smell, there were funny comments from them, but they got it all at the end.

Book designers: as we have been discussing how we can make our own books, this week, they come up with their own design on how they want their book to be.

Quick reminder

School will be close on December 24th-January 1st for Winter break.

What we did in pictures.

Family day Vibe!