Week of 5/20

Dear Polar Bear Families,
Reminders:

• No school this Monday May 27th. Closed for Memorial Day
• Friday May 31st we have our 3’s field trip to Victoria Gardens in central park. Every child must be accompanied by one adult. Montclare T-shirts for the kids, one adult and one child’s entrance ticket provided. Please bring a lunch for you and your child. We’ll have lunch after some fun. We’ll meet at Victoria Garden’s and go in as a group. 
 
Theme: Celebrating the Alphabet
Letter of the week: A-Z
 
Some books we read this week:

• ABC I Like Me!, by Nancy Carlson
• Animals A to Z, by David McPhail’s
• A My Name is Alice, by Jane Bayer
• Eating The Alphabet, by Lois Ehlert

 
Classroom Activities

• This week we celebrated the alphabet by reading lots of alphabet books and playing lots of games. Our favorite was called “Kaboom”. The children pick out sticks with letters on them and keep them. If they get one with no letter, they yell “Kaboom” and get to collect all the sticks taken out so far. 
• Monday Center time we used to practice writing our letters with our Handwriitng without Tears materials.
•  During center time on Tuesday we played a game focusing on categories. The children are still learning how to name and organize categories in their thoughts. For example, we asked, “is a pepper a fruit or vegetable?” We continued the game using different categories (fruit, vegetable, animal, flower etc) and continued naming as many things in each category as possible. 
•  During our center time on Thursday we focused on sequencing. In order to learn how to read, it is important that children understand that stories have a beginning, middle, and ending. We divided the children into groups and showed them 4 cards with each with a moment in a sequence of events. The children had to look at all 4 cards, and then decide what happened first, second, third and forth. 
• For our art project this week we began working on our outside bulletin  board. It’s the goodbye board for the year, so we decided to celebrate something we all love that says “summer” to us… Ice Cream!
•  We also got to celebrate our final Polar Bear who will be turning 4. Mischa’s parents and baby brother came in to help us celebrate her birthday in July. 

 
We hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.

Best wishes,
Karen, Rebecca, and Marvin