On Thursday our Alphabet Friend Nellie got her eyes and name tag so she was ready to play in the classroom and hung out on the ceiling over our newspaper house painting table , explored number puzzles, used number blocks and cookie cutters in kinetic sand, made more handprints to work on our Coping Skill of counting while tracing our fingers, continued to find the letters of our names cut out of newspapers to work on spelling and recognizing our names in both upper and lower case. Our Golden Letter teacher and preschool friends, Grandpa Norm and Nessa were back in the morning!
We added paint to our cardboard box house and used it to deliver newspapers (read more below!).
This week we are counting fingers while slowly tracing them. This brings us gently into the present moment and provides sensory input from feeling and auditory input by counting aloud.
We wrote number shapes in our journals today. The numbers one and zero (and ten) are often easy for preschoolers to make, but they get significantly more difficult! At preschool we are not looking for mastery, we are looking to begin making the shapes that will one day go together in numeral formation.There are a lot of little poems that can be used when writing number shapes. Here is the one we have at our school:
Our Clean Up song this week is A Neighborhood is a Friendly Place by Ms Ella Jenkins. In this song Ms Ella tells a little story and the children are learning to stop and freeze when the music stops…you can try it at home!
A few conversation starters:
Morning class: What did people stick in their mouth to make a funny face? Oranges! Gus brought yummy Cara Cara Navel oranges and Nilla wafers. Thank you, Gus!
Afternoon class: What kind of N chips did we eat? Nacho cheese Doritos! Heath brought them along with navel oranges and nutritious Nature fruit bars. Thank you, Heath!
All week we will be offering fresh broccoli “trees” at snack time to remind us that newspaper and all paper originally came from trees. Fun fact: According to the latest data from the American Forest & Paper Association, around 65-69% of paper used in the United States in 2023 is made from recycled materials, meaning roughly 31-35% of paper is still produced from trees.
What do the numbers mean on your newspaper house?
Our addresses! Today we painted on newspaper cut into a house shape and added our house numbers.
Check at home to see if you can find the same numbers on your house (and if they are different than the project I apologize…I used the information on your child’s enrollment form). This is not something we expect young children to memorize -we are simply planting the seed and making connections between home and school.
During Story Time we learned about compound words: newspaper and paperboy.
3 Color questions: Today we read The Paperboy by Dav Pilkey (also from our local library) and learned about a big kid who gets up early to roll newspapers and deliver them. During Circle Time we rolled newspapers and practiced throwing them to different “houses” in our classroom.
What color was the delivery boy’s newspaper bag? Red! What color were the rubber bands he used? Green!
What color rubber bands did you use? We had red yellow, blue in different sizes and used our rubber bands to practice delivering newspapers to the porch of our cardboard house.
newcreationpreschool.com 