Dec 6- Dec 10

We had a lot of fun this week talking about Christmas, the gingerbread man, and the letter "G." The students loved decorating the classroom! They can decorate our two trees in the room during center time and one day they even put garland up in the kitchen area. They also love seeing all their Christmas artwork up around the room and in the hallway. This week we made sparkling snowflakes, a Christmas tree mobile, gingerbread men, cinnamon-smelling gingerbread men ornaments, and a "G" garden. For the letter "G" we had a puppet named Gus the Goat and read a story about him.

This week we also practiced sorting gingerbread men and when on a gingerbread man letter hunt. We played a jingle bell listening game, and a matching game using hershey kisses that had letters on the bottom of them. We practiced counting gingerbread men and also got to make some patterns. Ian also brought us some gingerbread cookies to eat one day! We read lots of good Christmas books this week like "Toot and Puddle," "If You Take a Mouse to the Movies," "Merry Christmas, Little Critter," "Oliver All Alone," and "Gingerbread Baby." When we read the book "Gingerbread Baby" each student got to hold a mask of one of the characters from the story and afterwards we talked about what their character did in the story. They love playing with those masks too!

On Wednesday Mrs. Jones came to visit our class again to talk to us some more about fire safety. The kids got to practice crawling under the "smoke" and learned what to do if there's a fire in our house.

We had lots of fun today at Santa's Workshop! We made star ornaments, santa ornaments, chocolate-dipped spoons, reindeer ornaments, reindeer food, decorated gingerbread cookies, danced ballet, and got to see Santa!

Don't forget our Christmas Program is Wednesday the 15th at 8:30. It is probably only going to last 10-15 minutes and we would love to see you all there! The kids are very excited about it, we've been practicing for weeks and they all have a special part to play! And don't forget about the costumes....if you have any questions about what you need to bring, please ask!

And on Friday the 17th at 10:30 we're having our class Christmas Party! Thanks to everyone who signed up to bring stuff and remember we would LOVE for you to come! We'll have plenty of food to eat and fun crafts to make.

If you have not yet brought your 10 dollars for the Gala project, if you could bring it by the paty date, that would be great!

I have some pictures from this past week and of today from Santa's Workshop. Enjoy!

Nov 28- Dec 3

This week we took down all our Fall stuff and started decorating for Christmas! We also talked about safety and the letter C. We brought out a new puppet, "Curtis the Cow," and read a story called Cathy Cook. We practiced writing c's by making a chain filled with c's and also by writing rainbow c's. We are continuing to work on our letter sounds and talking about how important it is to know the sound that the letters make so that we can learn to read! We are only working on the sounds of the letters that we've learned so far: S, F, Y, A, K, H, Q, O, N, I, and C. It would be great if you could review these letters with your child at home for some extra practice! And we are working really hard on being able to write our names by ourselves. I have seen lots of improvment with this!

We have worked in small groups this week to review letters and we played a letter hunt game, we worked on our cutting skills and on making groups of ten. We also worked on sorting by colors and then counting our different groups.

For safety this week we talked about the number 911 and how it is a very important number, but it's one that we never call for fun. We talked about what an emergency is and when we might need to use that number. The students practiced "calling" 911 by using the phones they cut out. We talked about how to be safe in the car, at school, when crossing the street, and at home. We sorted items that were either dangerous to play with or safe to play with. We read a story called First Aid and talked about what to do when we get hurt. We also played a "find the matches" game. I made fake matches and hid them around the room and if a student found one they would bring it to me (an adult, because it's not to play with) and then they would get  a hug. They had a lot of fun with that! We practiced stopping, dropping, and rolling and did an experiement with a candle and talked about how fire needs air, so that's why we don't go running if our clothes are on fire. But we stop, drop, and roll. We also talked a lot about strangers and how we never go with someone we don't know, even if they seem nice or try to give us something.

For art this week we did marble paintings, made shape snowmen, decorated some ornaments, decorated shirts to hang on a clothesline, made poinsetta flowers, practiced mixing colors together to see what new colors we could make.

Next week we'll be talking about gingerbread men and the letter "G."

Don't forget about Santa's workshop next Friday! And we need parent volunteers to help out with the craft in our classroom!! Let me know if you would be interested in helping!

Also our Christmas party sign-up sheet will be up on Monday. I hope all of you will be able to make it to the party, it's going to be lots of fun!

We still need 10 dollars per child for the Gala art project if we haven't gotten it yet. And we are moving the work day to finish it up to next Wednesday (December 8th). We'll start pulling kids into the art room to finish it up after chapel...around 8:45. If you would like to come help out with that, that would be great!


Hope everyone has a great weekend! See you all Monday!


Stephanie Ray
254-598-8101