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