Dear Families,
We are starting our Family Traditions unit. This week we've learned about what a "tradition" is, and what some examples are of family traditions. Here is what we'll be reading.
Small Groups
Monday Matching utensils and setting the table for family dinner
Tuesday Piecing together puzzle pieces of Max from Bunny Cakes
Arts&Crafts
Monday Decorating boxes for our holiday gifts
Please remember that this Wednesday, 11/27, is a half day at the BECC. All students will be dismissed at 11:30, and there will be no afternoon session that day. Have a great Thanksgiving!
-The Barnyard Buddies
Dear Families,
We have almost completed our Farm and Harvest unit. Because it's a short week this week we will wrap up and review what we've learned in our unit. Here are the books we will be reading.
Small Groups
Wednesday Making lanterns for the harvest
Thursday Sorting animals that migrate and hibernate
Arts&Crafts
Wednesday Using acorns and fall colors to make a "marble painting"
Please remember that Monday is a holiday, and Tuesday is a professional development day for teachers, so students will not return to school until that Wednesday, 11/13/13.
-The Barnyard Buddies
Dear Families,
We are continuing with our Farms/Harvest unit. This week we will be talking about how plants change as they grow and how farmers harvest the plants. Here is what we'll be reading this week.
Small Groups
Monday Sequencing apples by ascending size
Tuesday Matching animal babies to their parents
Wednesday Sorting what people and plants need to grow in a
Venn diagram
Thursday Drawing a picture of what our pumpkin plants look like
Arts&Crafts and Game time
Monday Making spider webs
Tuesday Playing bubbles, wagon rides, bowling, and scooters
Wednesday Decorating pumpkins
Thursday Playing bubbles, wagon rides, bowling, and scooters
Just a reminder, since we are reading a story about a Harvest "soiree", where animals are celebrating the end of the fall season, we decided to have our own Harvest "soiree" in the classroom on Wednesday, October 30th. Your child may dress up for the party if they wish (Perhaps a special shirt, a sparkly tutu, a costume, a
wig, a hat, pajamas, etc), but it is not mandatory.
As the weather is getting colder, please send your child to school in appropriate clothing every day, including adequate coats, socks and shoes, hats, and gloves, as necessary.
-The Barnyard Buddies
Dear Families,
We are now in our Farms and Harvest unit. We have been learning about what a farm and garden are, what kinds of animals live on a farm, and what farms and gardens can do for us. This week we will be learning about how to make farms and gardens grow, and what kind of work needs to be done to make plants grow. Here is what we will be reading this week.
Here's what we will be doing for small groups this week
Tuesday Making patterns with seeds
Wednesday Using stickers and tissue paper to make an apple tree
Thursday Planting pumpkin seeds for Halloween
During Arts&Crafts, we will be decorating our planting cups with orange and black tissue paper for our pumpkins to grow in and decorating onions with tissue paper, and carrots with pipe cleaners, to put on our cornucopia for Thanksgiving.
Don't forget about Back to School night on 10/17! Parents of students in the full-day program can come at 6:30, where we will discuss the morning schedule and activities, and parents of students in the afternoon program can come at 7:00, where we will discuss the afternoon schedule and curriculum. Parents of full day students are welcome to stay for both sessions. Hope to see you there!
-Barnyard Buddies
Dear Families
We are in our last week of our "Getting to know you" unit. We will start our OWL curriculum and our Preschool Life Skills curriculum next week. Here is what we will be reading this week.
Here is what we will be doing this week in Arts&Crafts:
Monday: Using eye droppers and watercolors on coffee filters
to make butterflies
Tuesday: Finger-painting a barn for our farm/harvest mural in the
hallway
Wednesday: Making sun-catchers with the first letter of our names by
painting tissue paper with glue
Thursday: Decorating leaves with red, yellow, and orange collage
materials to put on our autumn tree
Here is what we will be doing for Small Groups:
Monday: Following AB patterns
Tuesday: Practicing tracing our names
Wednesday: Identifying colors and following 2-step directions
Thursday: Sequencing a three part picture story
Starting next week, we will be splitting our Arts&Crafts time with a new activity, called Game Time. Each group will happen twice per week. Game time is an opportunity for students to interact with one other peer and a teacher for support and work on cooperative play skills by playing a game together. We will be working on taking turns, requesting a turn from a peer, waiting for a turn, and cognitive/motor concepts such as matching, sorting, throwing and catching, kicking a ball, etc. It gives our students who are verbal an added opportunity to interact and play new games with our students who are non-verbal. Student pairs will switch every week, so all of the students will have an opportunity to play with each other over the course of the year.
You also may have noticed that your child came home with a prize in their backpack. All of the preschool classrooms here at the BECC have a token system. This means that students earn a token for exhibiting the correct behavior at school (i.e. sitting quietly, raising their hand, listening to teachers, working hard at small group time, sharing with a friend, etc.) and once they earn a certain number of tokens, they get a prize. In the Barnyard Buddies, each student has a treasure map on the wall. When they do the right thing at school, they earn a pirate coin for their map. Once their map is full of pirate coins, they get to pick a prize from our special treasure chest!
We also have two new bulletin boards in our classroom that we are very excited to show you at our Back to School Night. The first is a work board, where we can showcase all of the great work that our students do on the wall for each unit. The second bulletin board is a Helping Hands bulletin board. When a student is seen doing something nice for a friend, they get a special paper-doll cut-out to put on the bulletin board, that says what they did. When you come in to visit, you can read about all of the nice things our friends are doing for each other at school.
-The Barnyard Buddies
