Happy New Year! We hope you had a wonderful time with your loved ones this holiday season. We had a fun filled month celebrating lots of different days that we found on calendar.ca. We hope to continue this throughout the new year. All December long Christmas was the main topic amongst the children. One thing they looked forward to each morning is finding where our elf on the shelf, Candy Cane, was hiding. Our favourite surprise was when she was in a jar so that we could hold her, show her around the classroom, and even bring her outside to push her down the slide. We hope you enjoyed your little one’s gifts that they worked so hard on. They could hardly contain their excitement to give them to you.
During the month of December, we continued working on spelling our names and early writing skills. Some activities that promoted this goal was using a paintbrush in hot cocoa to write sight words written on Santa’s beard and name tracing using name tags. At circle, each friend took a turn using the reindeers with letters on them to spell their name, which allowed Santa to pull his sleigh. Another version of this game was using cookies to spell their name for Santa to want to eat them. These activities are an engaging way for the preschoolers to learn letter and name recognition and name spelling.
Some emerging topics that we will discuss in the month of January is Winter and the weather. Each morning the children are excited to do the calendar that our friend Maizie donated. One spot on our calendar is what the weather is like today and what it will be like tomorrow. The preschoolers love to look out the window and work together to decide what card bests fits the description for that day. When it’s time to see what the weather will look like tomorrow, they look forward to guessing what it will be like and are starting to understand the symbols on the weather app. They have been guessing tornados a lot! Our friend Brooks even wants to be a weatherman when he grows up. Another portion of the calendar is what season it is. They are looking forward to the transition to Winter and have been counting down the days. We are hoping for some snow to enjoy during outside time.
We look forward to welcoming a new group of friends into our classroom this month. We can’t wait to see what the year 2024 has in store!