Little Busy Bodies Preschool
Newsletter
October 3 & 5, 2011
Dear Preschool Parents,
This week we were down in numbers… we missed AJ! Hope you’re feeling better soon, buddy, your friends were asking about you, and we had a definite hole when we were sitting on the carpet.
We’ve moved our focus to numbers! We began by reading the book, “Ten Black Dots,” by Donald Crews. “Ten Black Dots” is a story about just that, ten black dots. The author begins his book with one dot that can make a sun and counts all the way up to 10 dots that make balloons stuck in a tree. This book not only provides opportunity to count to ten, but it also allows the children’s creative juices to flow as they think of other things that can be done with 10 black dots. Of course, that’s what we did. I gave each child 10 black dots and they came up with their own pictures from the class brainstorming session. Activities for any book are hit and miss depending upon the class and their abilities. This activity this time around was a bit challenging for them. Although they had no problem coming up with ideas of things that could be made from ten black dots (i.e. watermelon, flies, ladybugs, wheels on cars, eyeballs on people, etc.) it was difficult for them to get their pictures to look like their idea.
Our second book we read was “Look Whooo’s Counting,” by Suse Macdonald. Young Owl takes a sunset-to-dawn census of her habitat one night and learns to count in the process. As she counts "1 prairie dog sitting on a hill," "2 mice in the field," and so on, something magical happens: the animals and insects closely resemble individual numbers, as do her own feathers. When Owl counts "8 spiders in a web," for example, the bodies of the spiders look just like the numeral eight, while Owl's under feathers form the numerals one through eight. After reading this story, we worked together as a class using number cards and coordinating animal cards from the book to count and organize the animals so we could have a visual representation of the story and number pyramid.
REMINDER
*KING/ QUEEN OF THE WEEK OCT. 19th & 21st: AJ…Feel free to bring in a poster, if you want, and don’t forget snack (I have cups and napkins).
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
*October 10th-12th MUSD Fall Break--NO SCHOOL
*October 17th--NO SCHOOL (My child attends Legacy Traditional and they have no school this day.)
*October 21st--MAKE-UP DAY Please let me know if this does NOT work with your schedule.
Have a wonderful Fall Break!
Amber
