FRIDAY NEWSLETTER
Friday, May 20, 2011
Only a few weeks left of school! Can you believe it?! This week we all worked hard as a team, to finger paint our ocean for Ocean Night! There is nothing like the feel of paint squishing between your fingers. We continue to create beautiful sea creature in different textures. Our sea horses are adorned with gold sand and boy did we have fun making them! We did a fantastic job on our sea weed too! This special board is off to a great start. The finished product will be something to be very proud of!
We continued to work on counting this week and practiced cutting. We also enjoyed learning about the Ocean by watching Disneynature’s, Ocean! There were so many ooohs and ahhwwwwss! It was a great way to support and bring to life what we have read about different sea creatures. All of our centers have been stocked up with MARE themed activities such as the Rainbow Fish matching game, in the math center.
Please remember that next week, on Wednesday, our class will be visiting the PTA sponsored book fair. If you would like your child to purchase books, please send money in a labeled envelope. Have a great weekend.

Mrs. Gilberti

Friday Newsletter
FRIDAY, MAY 13, 2011

I hope that everyone enjoyed their Mother’s Day and got some much deserved time to relax. We have started our unit on the ocean and sea creatures and are preparing our board for Ocean Night! I can’t believe I’m saying that already. Where has time gone?! The children will be working hard using cutting, gluing, painting, pinching and many other fine motor skills, to help turn our bulletin board into a beach and shore. This is when we stress team work and we all do our best to come together to create the most beautiful board that we can and feel a huge sense of pride.

We started our week off with discussions of ocean creatures and the ocean floor. We worked so hard on our touch and feel beach and ocean scenes. Please visit my blog to view a picture of our work. We also continued to work on number recognition and counting by using numbered fish to create fish bowls which are hanging on display in our room. We even worked on classifying and to my delight, everyone did a fantastic job! We continued to work on tracing words and worked on opposites, such as wet and dry. Since it’s been so beautiful out, we have even been making good use of the playground!
Saturday is the PTA sponsored Kids Tricky Tray, here at OCS at 3pm! I hope to see some of you there. Also on Wednesday, May 25th, at 9:25, the preschoolers will be visiting the library to purchase books at the PTA Book Fair! If purchasing books, please send in money with your child in a labeled envelope. Enjoy your weekend!

Mrs. Gilberti

Nothing can warm the heart like a hug from Mom. This week we closed up our unit on butterflies and their life cycle and focused on some pretty wonderful women. The children have all worked so hard on surprise gifts for their own Mommy. In order to keep it a secret until Sunday, I won’t mention any more about it! I will say that we did continue practicing our names remembering to use a capital letter to start, followed by lower case letters. We made great use of our white board when practicing matching capital letters to lower case letters. We focused on letters A/B/C/D. We also practiced writing and tracing numbers 1-10. In our Math center, the children practiced number recognition by using number boards, magnetic colored chips and a magnet to help sweep up the chips once their board was full. Judging by the amount of time each child spent in this center, it’s safe to say this was a pretty popular game. We also got to go to the gym this week and played basketball, squeezed in a yoga session and used our imaginations to go on a bear hunt!
Today, the whole school is kicking off MARE! Yes, it’s that time of year again. For the next couple of weeks, we will be focused on the ocean and its amazing creatures. Getting ready for ocean night is always so exciting for the children!
I hope everyone enjoys their weekend! Happy Mother’s Day to all!

Mrs. Gilberti