Back to School!

Our first few weeks back were really exciting! Amy and I both have new rooms and had fun preparing our rooms for our new group of kiddos. The kids are already gettting acclimated to their new routines, learning how our classrooms work and what our expectations are. It's going great!

We started by reading some really great stories, and both of these were wonderful ways to teach compassion and the concept of building up peers or breaking them down. They are highly recommended!

After reading the story and discussing how a person's bucket could be filled or emptied, we painted our own buckets to display in the classroom. Although the concept is a little abstract, the kids really connected with the story and it prompted great conversation about how to treat others. The kiddos asked to hear it almost every day!

 

We also read Lily's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes and talked about our school rules and our classroom rules. We also learned how to describe a character by thinking about the story afterwwards.

After reading The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn we played a pocket chart matching game.

Next, we play name game names! First, we read this popular Kevin Henkes book:

Then we worked on name flowers. The kids wrote a letter on each petal and then painted stems and leaves. It was a great writing and cutting activity.

For morning message, we counted the number of letters in our names and compared them to Chrysanthemum.

We counted the letters in our name at math and compared more, less or the same!

Ms. Amy's class worked on name writing and free drawing with whiteboards.

Both classes worked on a name sheet called Rainbow names where we wrote our names with many different colors. You can print this out at home if your child wants to practice their name more! You can find it here.

After doing lots of names activities, we did activities to help us learn a little about each of us.

 Pre-K 2 made a "Tasty Face" snack craft! It was super cute and pretty yummy. (We used icing in place of peanut butter since we are a nut free environment.)

In Pre-K 1, we made people blocks. They are really silly and fun to play with!

The Pre-K classes gave the children an at home project to decorate a t-shirt that showed something about them. The kids did a wonderful job working on the shirts and were so excited to share them with us.

Pre-K 1 did self portraits to go with our shirts...

Both classes studied our fingerprints with magnifying glasses in science.

And  we explored our new classrooms, played with old and new friends and had a great time!

We hope your start to school was as great as ours!