The twos are off to a great start. Twelve darling children are coming to CED and settling into a new routine. Biscuit looks forward to seeing them and getting her daily hug!

Each month a new color and shape will be introduced and used throughout that month. In September, the color is red and the shape is the circle. The students hunted for red circles, made pictures with red circles and even made a circle using Cheerios! Apples are included this month and we painted red apples to take home and to decorate our room. We talk each day about finding red on our clothes and within our room. The students tasted three different types of apples and told us which one they liked the best.

Part of our day is learning our routine. They are getting very good at getting ready for lunch, helping to clean the room, learning to share toys, and singing. We do lots of songs: funny ones, ones to help us get to lunch and recess, songs about red, and nursery rhymes. We talk about nursery rhymes and use flannel pictures so that the children see what they are singing about for many of the songs.

We celebrated a birthday already! Happy Birthday to Mckenna!

Thank you for sending your dear children to us. The first month is filled with separation anxiety, adjusting to a new environment, and learning the rules, but it gets better..we think it is harder on you, the parent! We have lots of fun things planned for the year!  

What a fantastic first month of school!  Everyone came in the class eager and ready for a wonderful year.  The students have had so much fun playing together and becoming friends. The All About Me suitcase, which is going home on a rotating basis, is providing each student a chance to present special items from home that help us learn more about each other. Each child will have the opportunity to participate in this activity. 

The classroom and everyday routine is becoming familiar to the children.  Most students have now mastered the choosing board during center time and know our schedule throughout the day.

Froggy is a big hit!  He has been traveling home every weekend with his school friends who have shared wonderful stories about their weekend adventure with him.  Each child will get to take Froggy home several times throughout the year.  Other books will also be sent home to read and enjoy.

Ian Carpenter celebrated his fourth birthday! He wore the birthday crown and chose something from our birthday surprise cake.  He also brought delicious cookies for us to share at snack time.

The shape of the month was the circle.  The children drew circles, made a circle collage, and went all around the church on a circle hunt.  Red was the color for September.  The class painted with red, listened to lots of stories about red, and learned lots of songs about red.

During this month our other units included Family, Friends, Feelings, Sense of Hearing and Tasting, Apples and Johnny Appleseed.  The children compared the tastes of green, red and yellow apples and made a graph of our favorites.  Mrs. Bennett brought her special apple peeler to share.  Johnny Appleseed visited our classroom after the students learned how he planted apple seeds all around our country to grow new apple trees.

Fall is going to be very exciting with units including bats, spiders, pumpkins, and fire safety!  Thanks so much for sharing your precious children with us.

September brings the color red and the circle shape to the Pooh's Three Years Old Class.  The children started the month with a red collage and finding the color red all around the room.  Red playdough and pegs were introduced as the manipulatives this month.

Painting is a favorite activity in our class.  Three year olds enjoyed painting with circles.  Lids of all sizes were use to represent the circle shape.  Sponge painting and making apple prints with red were other experiences the class participated in during the month of September.

Apple finger games and songs were introduced this month.  Tasting apple juice, apple sauce, and apples were a favorite of the three year old class.  The favorite finger game is:

The Apple Tree

Way up high in the apple tree,

Two little apples smiled at me,

I shook the tree as hard as I could

Down fell the apples,

M-m-m-m they were good!!!

The five senses were discussed during science.  The sense of smell, hearing, seeing, touching, and tasting were introduced to the class.  We did an experiment of taste by tasting sour-pickles, bitter-radishes, sweet-chocolate, and salty-pretzels.  Everyone enjoyed the chocolate!

The month ended with a visit from Johnny Appleseed. We learned that he traveled across America planting apple seeds.   Johnny Appleseed Day was celebrated by making and tasting our own small apple pies.

We had a great month!

Welcome to Clifford's PreK!  We teachers are all very happy to have your child in our class and we are looking forward to an exciting and fun mystery-solving year!

Our first week in September brought fun with our new classmates and with Clifford the Big Red Dog.  We learned about our class rules and schedule, our morning calendar and lesson work, our Learning Centers and our mascot, Clifford.  We began working with the letter Cc - solving the mystery of its sounds.  We discovered it has multiple sounds and begins words like Clifford, Coy, center, ceiling, children and chicken. 

Our second week of September brought us more fun with the letter Cc and with our first predictable book - Brown Bear  Brown Bear  What Do You See? written by Bill Martin, Jr. and illustrated by Eric Carle.  We learned about our first punctuation mark - the Question Mark- listening to hear our voices go up at the end of the sentence.  We role-played the Brown Bear story with stick puppets and language dictated our own version of the book called  Clifford  Clifford  Who Do You See? - a class book that will soon come home in our Clifford Book Bags.  We opened the Science Center with activities using our Sense of Sight and experimented with Mr. Poe's "Blind Glasses" to understand how it feels to be blind.  We also read a second predictable book by Martin and Carle called  Polar Bear  Polar Bear  What Do You Hear? and added Sense of Hearing activities to the Science Center.

Our third week of September brought us fun with family and the fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  We read several versions of the story and then presented four class plays about the story.  We used proper audience and actor etiquette and appropriate voices of volume and expression.  Lots of pictures were taken and will come home (in our Clifford Book Bags)  in the class book that we language-dictated called Goldilocks and the Three Bears Class Book. Needless to say, our presentations were followed by great applause and 'Bravo's!  We helped Mrs. Damerau measure ingredients for our "Three Bears Porridge" and went for a walk in the forest while it cooled.  Yum Yum!  We read our third predictable book by Martin and Carle called Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to continue of our fun with the letter Bb.  We solved the mystery of letter B's sound - it always makes the same one!  We played Clifford Bingo and typed our names in Braille on Mr. Poe's Braille typewriter! And just for fun we read a very special version of  Goldilocks called  The Three Bears Visit Goldilocks.

Our fourth week of September brought us fun with our new season - Autumn.  We read about Clifford's First Autumn and recalled signs of this new season.  We read Fresh Fall Leaves to discover that every tree has its own shape of leaf and we read Why Leaves Change Color to solve the mystery about falling leaves.  We created Autumn leaves for our hall tree mural by using an art form technique called collage - just like our illustrator Eric Carle.  We began our fun with the letter Aa and discovered that it makes many sounds, just like the letter Cc ,beginning words like: Abby, Addie, Andrew, act, acorn, April, Amen, and autumn.  We learned about our American Flag, made 3 cornered American hats and discovered Eight Keys to a Better Me.  We counted, sang and marched like ants and made triangles when we formed the capital letter A.  We had a visit from the one and only Johnny Appleseed.  He told us all about the legend of his life.  We used our sense of taste to compare three colors of apples, recorded our favorite, and created a bar graph to show our results.

We had a busy and fun first month of PreK!  

How quickly the first month of school has flown!  We will try our best to not let that happen the rest of the year! Our class is so precious; we want to enjoy every moment of it. All of our friends have gotten to know each other through lots of songs and games. It is nice to meet new friends and we have enjoyed getting to know Curious George.

We started our first unit learning about George's habitat. The jungle is an exciting place and students were amazed at the different animals that live there with George. We loved working with positional words as we placed animals in George's banana tree. Using our binoculars, we went on a jungle safari and took wonderful photographs with our imagination. We hope they were shared with mom and dad.

The first letter we have explored is the letter C. We learned the hard and soft sound that it makes and danced to Alphabet Action, The Soft Sound of C and Do You Know the Sound of C which gave us riddles of words with the hard c sound. Chicka, Chicka Boom Boom was introduced (where letters kept falling out of the coconut tree). We counted coconuts with our magic math machine and placed them in the coconut tree. Students put coconuts on a sheet and bounced them everywhere. Our budding, young scientists had fun exploring a real coconut. We learned about making a hypothesis and predicted that everything from water to apple juice might be in our coconut! Coconut- cracking is messy business and best done outside with a hammer. It was a lot of fun to see it explode in Mrs. Hale's face!

The next week was our bear unit that began with Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? We talked about the sense of sight. The letter of the week was B to go along with all of our bears. Bears were sorted and lots of bear games and songs were enjoyed. Going on a Bear Hunt is our new favorite song. We talked about the sense of taste as we read about Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Oatmeal was tasted and was liked by most students. There was a teddy bear show and tell, and finishing our unit on bears, we had a teddy bear parade to the tune of When the Bears Go Marching In.

A strange visitor came to our room who wore a pot on his head. We were happy to hear all about how he planted apples trees because we loved apple tasting. The letter of the week was A to go along with our apple unit. We had a flannel story about Johnny Appleseed and talked about the life cycle of an apple. We counted apple seeds (raisins) and placed them in our apples. Applejacks were placed on the letter A to reinforce the shape and sound of long and short A.

We have learned so much this past month and are anxious to experience fall and all the fun of October. Be ready for creepy, crawly things next month!