Pre-K: Beaty, Beethoven and Blops

We had a busy week in Pre-K exploring the letter Bb.

This week we read 3 books by the author Andrea Beaty: Ada Twist, Scientist; Iggy Peck, Architect and Rosie Revere, Engineer. Not surprisingly, we discussed what scientists, architects and engineers do as well as who can become them (anyone!). We are so happy that this class LOVES to read. They look at books both independently and together, and are completely engaged while we read as a class. We are also a class that loves games. Letter Bingo and an alphabet dot game were big hits this week, and we particularly liked that the children played in pairs, which fostered conversation as well as letter-building skills.

After reading 10 Black Dots, Pre-K used 10 black paper circles each to recreate something from the book or from their own imaginations. Our trickiest math activity so far this year was on Thursday, when children showed 3 different ways to represent numbers for our math bulletin board. We wrote the cardinal numbers, the word, and made a ten-/20-frame! Lots of the results are up on our math board, but we will continue to work on them.

Before we visited with Melissa from Puddlestompers for the first time, we talked more about Ada, who asked lots of questions, collected facts and made lots of guesses. Your children did a beautiful job being scientists with Melissa when we learned about reptiles.

Pre-K painted the letters of the name of our school in blue, of course, and proudly displayed them in order at music with Paula. We then sang the Bowen song (to the tune of BINGO) as a school. We also watched the flash mob of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbJcQYVtZMo, which the children absolutely loved. A discussion followed about different instruments and how that piece made us feel.

This newsletter wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the fabulous building our class did in our block area this week. The architecture was impressive, and the addition of balls and ramps added to the fun and experimentation.

We completed our week on Friday by baking (and eating) banana bread and reading about Rosie Revere. We asked the children what they would create if they became engineers themselves. Here are their answers:

Evan - a building

Catherine and Selah - an airplane

Gracie, David and Jiyoo - a helicopter

Jack - a fire engine

Lara - a fire truck

Harry - a dinosaur

Asher - a double-decker plane

Haley - cars

Carter - a T-rex robot

Have a lovely long weekend, and we will see you next Tuesday!

Emily and Martine

Books this week included: