Thank you all for coming out to make the pre-k graduation such a success. The kids were so excited to sing for you all. I thank you all for allowing me an amazing school year with your children. I'm very sad to see them move on but at the same time very proud to have had the opportunity to be their pre-k teacher! Next week, we will have all half days. The children will all be together for the last three days during the morning session. Please remember that Monday is Field Day with a rain date of Tuesday! Our pre-k and preschool students will be dismissed at 11:00 a.m.

Have a great weekend!

Mrs. Gilberti

I hope that everyone enjoyed the sun this past weekend. I'm sorry this is coming out to you on Monday but unfortunately, I was out on Friday. I even missed a very important birthday!!! Shane turned 5 this month! Happy Birthday buddy! We are down to our last full week of school. We have finished our unit on MARE and our bulletin board looks fantastic. This year, we even added some beautiful mermaids and pirates! You might recognize some of them! This Friday, will be celebrating our PRE-K class with a small graduation ceremony. Where does time go? I can't believe they are off to Kindergarten already and that preschool will be moving up to PRE-K!!!! Unfortunately, as per school policy, siblings cannot attend school parties. We also would like to remind parents that when taking pictures, please be aware of other students and their families preferences, of whether they would like their child's photo posted on any social media networks. Next week, Monday-Wednesday, are half days. That will mean that a.m. and p.m. classes will be combined and begin at 8:20 and end at 11. Monday will be Field Day here at OCS. Please send your child in with a towel, bathing suit under his/her clothes and sunscreen applied prior to getting to school. The rain date for Monday will be the next day, Tuesday! PPPHHHEEWWWWW!!! So much going on in the next few days. If you have any questions or concerns, please email me at Agilberti@oxfordcentral.org.


Mrs. Gilberti

I hope that everyone enjoyed their three day weekend! This week it felt more like summer than spring! We continued to get our creative juices flowing and worked on crafts to create jellyfish, sea stars and sea horses. Did you know that a jellyfish is not a fish? We are really enjoying learning new facts about ocean creatures of all shapes and sizes. We really have been fine tuning our fine motor skills and continue to practice writing our names using lowercase letters. I can't believe that Kindergarten is just around the corner for all my friends in Pre-K.

We have been enjoying this great weather and playing outside. Please remember to apply sunscreen on your child before attending school and feel free to send in an extra bottle of water for your child. Next week, I will be sending out information about our Pre-K graduation celebration, so keep an eye out in your child's folder for the invite. Enjoy your weekend!

Mrs. Gilberti

This week, we continued to learn about sea creatures. We learned that a whale is a mammal and is actually part of the dolphin family. The kids where so surprised to learn this. We also learned that fish, unlike mammals, breathe under water with gills. The kids also enjoyed exploring the sea creatures through the use of crafts. We made puffy paint sharks, paper snipped whales and paper plate fish. On Wednesday, our p.m. class was thrilled to watch their siblings practice for the Spring concert. We will continue to learn about sea creatures next week and also will continue to work on our ocean board. I hope that everyone enjoys their three day weekend!

Mrs. Gilberti

This week in preschool we began our unit on MARE. We had soooooo much fun painting our ocean with our fingers! We were very impressed to learn that there are 24,000 different kinds of fish in the ocean. In the next few weeks, we will be learning about different sea creatures and creating our ocean board for ocean week. We have a lot going on next week. The Spring Scholastic Book Fair will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday. Our p.m. class will be attending the sale on Tuesday and our a.m. class will attend on Wednesday. Please have the children bring in their money, in an envelope with their name on it. Also, the book sale will be going on before and after our Spring concert, which will be on Wednesday, May 22. On Monday, May 20, every student will have their Spring photo taken. Families will have the opportunity to view the proofs before purchasing. No purchase is necessary if you do not like the proofs. Our weather has been really nice out and we have been getting the children out to play. Please remember that for safety reason, sandals are not permitted on the playground. I hope that you all enjoy your weekend!

Mrs. Gilberti

This week we were busy learning about butterflies and their life cycles. We learned about symmetry and enjoyed exploring this concept using paints and our butterfly paper templates. We folded over our butterflies and only painted one side.

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The kids loved when we had to bring the painted side and non painted side together to be rubbed. There was excitement to see what colors blended and how both sides were now symmetric. Since exploring colors was so much fun, we got creative with coffee filters. What I found commical was that the children had no idea what a coffee filter was. I guess everyone has a Keurig these days. We used our washable markers to color them in and enjoyed watching the colors blend when wet. We even got creative when recreating the butterfly lifecycle using pasta and paper! Overall, it's been a week of fun and exploration. I hope that everyone enjoys their weekend and that all of us Mommy's get some extra time to sleep!!!!

Mrs. Gilberti

What a gorgeous weekend! I hope that all my friends were out looking for insects and spiders because we spent the week learning about their differences. We enjoyed learning new facts about different types of insects and had fun crafting and working on our fine motor skills. This week we will be learning about the butterfly life cycle. Since the weather has been so nice out, we have been getting outside to play on the playground. It's such a great way for the children to practice social skills and gross motor skills. Please remember to apply sunscreen before they get to school and if you would like, send in an extra bottle of water. It gets hot out there while they are running around having fun.


Mrs. Gilberti

I hope that everyone got out to enjoy the weather over the weekend! We had such a busy week last week! We learned about ladybugs. Did you know that ladybugs are not just red with black dots?! We practiced counting with ladybug dots, got creative with our paper plates and turned them into ladybugs and learned some pretty interesting facts about our pretty little lady bugs. This week our a.m. class participated in our CORRECT assembly and everyone enjoyed the Duck Race!!! Our PM class enjoyed meeting their future kindergarten teachers at Kindergraten roundup! I can't believe it's that time of year already!! This coming week, we will learn about insects and how they differ from spiders. Enjoy your week!

Mrs. Gilberti

What an exciting week this has been for all of us. We love a week filled with science and experiments. Our first experiment was to track the water level of a cup filled with water that sits in the sun. As we predicted, the water has begun to evaporate and the water level is getting lower. We enjoyed our visit with Mrs. Paoloa's 3rd grade class. They invited us to watch their skit on the water cycle. It was awesome!!! This week we focused on seeds, plants and their parts. To support this we created sunflower craft and labeled plant parts. This leads us to our next experiment. We are waiting to see if our predictions are true about the stem. We placed blue dye into water and placed our white carnations into it. We can't wait to see what we will find Monday morning. Some of the kids think that the flowers will turn brown. Others believe that the flowers will stay white and others believe the flowers will turn blue. HHHMMMMMMM? Also this week, our sunflower seeds that we planted last week have begun to sprout!! Oh boy are the kids excited!!!! Tomorrow is the Autism 5k run/walk... rain or shine!!! I hope to see some familiar faces!! Enjoy the weekend!

Mrs. Gilberti

April Showers Bring May Flowers! Well, after the other night, my flowers have plenty of water for a few days! It is nice to see new life sprouting when walking around outside. This week was so beautiful and we loved playing outside on the playground. We made sure to look around and notice the grass growing in, flowing begining to pop out and bees buzzing around. Of course, the se are all signs that Spring truly has Sprung. This week, we reviewed the letter U, for Unique Umbrellas. We had fun crafting our umbrellas, rain drops and flowers. The children were all so excited about planting sunflower seeds. Each child will get a day to water the seeds and hopefully in a week or so, we will be able to see seedlings.

April 25th, will be Kindergarten Roundup. This is when your children will meet the Kindergarten teachers at 12:00 pm. Once the visit is over, they will return to the preschool day and continue with their school day. I will be sending more information about this next week.

This weekend is the Tricky Tray! I hope to see some familiar faces there! Also, this month is Autism Awareness month. Come and join us for an fun day on April 20th, at Meadow Breeze Park, for our Annual 5K Run/Walk Fundraiser. If you would like more information, please check out our school website. Enjoy your weekend!

Mrs. Gilberti

The Easter Bunny was here!!!! It must be because we have been preparing for him all week long! We had so much fun getting our creative juices flowing this week. We got to dye eggs and decorate them with jewels! We even turned




our egg cartons into baskets! Just to make sure the Easter Bunny would not get lost and miss our classroom, we all sat together, as a group, to map out where our classroom could be located in the building! As a group, we hand delivered it to Mrs. Halloran. We figured the Easter Bunny would have to be buzzed in by her, so she could just hand it to him! As usual, there were colors all around us, but this week in preschool, it's was super colorful. We had fun mixing colors to make new colors. It was cool to see what secondary colors we could make by mixing our primary colors!


I hope that everyone has a wonderful Spring Break! I want to thank you all for the donations to our Tricky Tray basket! It looks fantastic! I hope to see many of you there. See you all in April!

Mrs. Gilberti

SPRING HAS SPRUNG!!!!!



I can't wait to start feeling the temperature change and the flowers blooming. This week we reviewed some of our preschool skills. We practiced snipping, cutting, writing our names, counting, quantifying,



matching, number and letter identification! Phew! We were busy but did a great job with these skills. We had a great time making our Spring baskets, using glue, yarn and a balloon. Be sure to ask your child about it and what part the balloon played to create the baskets!

Our Tricky Tray basket is coming along nicely. I will collecting donations until Tuesday, March 26th. After that, the basket will be wrapped and delivered to the PTA. Mrs. Sturm, Mrs. Brands and I purchased a wooden toy chest, as our donation, for our classroom basket. We will use the toy chest as our "basket". It's going to look great! We could still use a few more items to fill up the toy chest. Some ideas would be videos, floor puzzles, board games and books! Thank you again for your generosity and I hope I get to see you all there!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!!! Lucky the Leprechaun was indeed here at OCS! We know this because he made a mess of our room! As expected, Lucky left behind gold coins and shamrocks. He can't help but be messy because he is always running! He did leave us a sweet note and a little treat, to apologize for his mess. This week we worked hard on patterns, learned about Ireland and enjoyed making our Fruit Loop rainbows! We even practiced writing our number words on shamrocks! Overall, it was a great week and the sweetest part of it all was seeing everyone's faces, as they walked in the room, to find Lucky's mess! Have a great weekend! Mrs. Gilberti

Well, well, well...March has certainly come in like a lion and I'm hoping it will go out like a lamb! I'm looking forward to planting my flowers. This week we discussed how the temperature is changing, the leaves on our trees are growing in, baby animals are being born and how our winter chill is beginning to warm up. We have started to chart the weather to see how the weather changes from the beginning of the month to the end of the month. We had a great time exploring the lion and the lamb through our crafts. We also had fun exploring all the different colors we begin to see in Spring. The children practiced their snipping skills creating rainbows out of colored snipped paper. I really enjoy having them on our classroom windows. They bring a smile to my face.

Thank you so much for the Tricky Tray donations. We will be collecting donations through the month of March! Remember, if you do not have time to shop for a donation and would like to donate money, I can shop for you. Let's make this basket great! I heard that this weekend will be beautiful, so please get out and enjoy!

Mrs. Gilberti

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!!!!! For years, we have all been delighted by the wonderful writings of Dr. Seuss. We spent all week enjoying some of his most recognized writings. We had so much fun this week with our crafts. The giggles that were heard coming from our room, while we painted each others feet, were like sunshine on a cloudy day. The children were paired up and each got to paint a friends foot and use their own foot as a stamper. This was such a great activity after reading, "The Foot Book." Now of course, we couldn't celebrate Dr. Seuess' birthday without making our own version of the very famous, red and white patterned hat, as seen on that naughty but fun cat! We also had fun practicing our rhyming words. We got a little silly generating a list of words that rhyme and did a fantastic job practicing clapping the syllables in our names! We turned oursleves into green eggs and voted which was our favorite Dr. Seuss book. My first guess would have been "The Cat in the Hat" would win but "Green Eggs and Ham" won the most votes.

Overall, this has been a fun packed week. We got to finally enjoy some time outside and look forward to sunny days on the playground. Thank you to those who have donated to our Tricky Tray basket. We will continue to be collecting for our basket next week.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Mrs. Gilberti

Hello Preschool families. We had fantastic week learning about dental hygiene. We learned that the Dentist is actually our friend and helps us to fight off cavities. The children enjoyed using their art dotters to write the letter D and did a great job generating words that begin with the letter D. We had wonderful conversations about how, when and why we should take care of our teeth. We also had fun sorting pictures of foods that are healthy for us and those that are not so healthy for us. We got to paste these pictures on a healthy tooth and on a cavity filled tooth. It was a great way to assess what the children had learned and a great way for them to practice classifying and sorting. We also practice sequencing by telling a story of Fred who was brushing his teeth and then having them retell the story by coloring in and cutting out the pictures of Fred. They then had to paste the picture in order, as they remembered the story, onto a separate piece of paper. I have to say that everyone did a great job with this! Next week, we will be exploring the fun Dr. Seuss!!!!!!

This week, I sent home a letter about the PTA sponsored Tricky Tray. I have volunteered to coordinate the classroom basket. Our theme is Preschool Days. If you cannot shop for a donation and would rather I do it, I do not mind. Remember, any amount will help. No donation is too little. Also, the tricky tray tickets are on sale now! Please get your tickets because the event always sells out! It will be held on April 13, 2013. I also want to thank everyone who sent in donations for Pennies for Patients. It is very much appreciated and the kids loved being able to help out!

Have a great weekend!

Mrs. Gilberti

It's good to have everyone back. I am writing this note a few days early to make sure everyone gets some very important information. As we know, last week and this week, the children and I have been working on Valentines Day activities. We have been focusing on the letters R and V and really practicing our lower case letters. With the cancellation of school on Friday and

the 2 hour delay yesterday, I wanted to reach out to everyone and remind our preschool families that this coming Friday is a half day. All students a.m. and p.m. will attend our morning session. Also, this week is Valentine's Day. The children are welcomed and encouraged to bring in Valentine's Day cards but please remember that our school policy will not allow for candy to be distributed with the cards. Also, the Tricky Tray is near!!!!!! If you are not familiar with the Tricky Tray, it is a fundraising night, sponsored by the PTA. Many baskets and prizes are raffled off while enjoying a delicious meal. A dinner buffet is served and is followed by coffee, tea and dessert. It's a great night out for all. Tickets go on sale now but be sure to pre-order because it sells out quickly! Now to the fun part! Every classroom gathers donations to be part of the class basket. I will be sending out a letter with your child, with information about our classroom baskets. My last bit of information is actually a gentle reminder about Kindergarten registration. Please have all the updated official immunization records, original birth certificate, 2 proof of residency documents and a recent picture of your child ready for registration day. Registration will be held March 6th and 7th. If you have any questions or concerns please contact me or the main office.

Mrs. Gilberti

Goodbye January and hello February! I know some people are hoping that Punxsutawney Phil does not see his shadow tomorrow but I'm waiting for Staten Island Chuck's prediction! Yes, yes, I admit it. I may be a little bias being I'm from NY but he hasn't let me down yet! Bring us Spring Chuck! Today in class, we are learning about groundhogs and groundhog day. The rest of the week, we spoke about night and day and learned about owls and the letter O.

This is a gentil reminder that the K-Kids Valentine Sweet Rose Sale is still going and all orders must be placed by February 6. The roses will be delivered on February 14. Also, the OCS community will be participating in the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Penny for Patients campaign. It will run for 3 weeks and all donations collected will help fund both cancer research and provide services to patients fighting cancer. All donations are appreciatiated!

Have a great weekend.

Mrs. Gilberti

We had a short week but managed to pack in a lot of fun activities. We used our snowmen to help us count, practice fine motor skills, practice tracing and cutting and to help us with our position words. We enjoyed making snowmen out of marshmallows, using cotton and paper shapes to create snowman faces, and we used paper circles which we wrote our names on to make another sn

owman. With all this talk about snowmen, I hope that everyone is ready for the snow we are supposed to get tonight! Enjoy your weekend!

Mrs. Gilberti

BBBBBBB

RRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!! Hello Jack Frost! I hope that everyone enjoyed their three day weekend! Our first day back was filled with talk about what we learned last week. Mother Nature and I planned it this way, hence the icy cold air!..lol Last week, we were all scientists. We learned about solids and liquids and how water changes when the tempurature changes. We enjoyed doing our first experiment. We put a liquid (water) into an ice tray. We then changed the temperature by putting the ice tray into a freezer and wouldn't you know it, the water turned to ice, just as we thought it would! We even put our creative juices to work by using popsicle sticks and beads to create icicles. All of use chuckled when we got to make ourselves into a snowman. We got to practice our patterns by coloring in our scarves with our two favorite colors! But, I have to say that the most fun was when we learned all about the letter I. We even made igloos out of marshmallows! Well, keep warm everyone!

Mrs. Gilberti

I hope that everyone had a wonderful weekend. It's good to be back and ready to start another week. Last week we continued to learned about polar bears and enjoyed learn

ing about penguins. We had fun waddling like penguins and learned some amazing facts about penguins, such as, the Mommy actually goes out to get food while daddy stays back and keeps the egg warm. The kids had fun watching the live cam from Sea World. We were lucky enough to catch feeding time! Since Penguin and Polar Bear start with the letter P, we learned all about it. We know the sound it makes and practiced identifying the sound at the beginning of words and at the end of words. We also have been practicing hard on writing our names and will continue to do so. Overall, it was a great week.

Mrs. Gilberti

What a great return after a wonderful break! It was so nice to see everyone again and to know how excited they all were to come back! We started the week off by talking about our vacation and the New Year. We enjoyed talking about all the fun we had in the snow and all the presents that Santa brought. I heard that for the New Year there were lots of balloons, confetti and hats to celebrate with. Here is preschool, we thought it would be fun to create New Year fireworks using combs, hairbrushes, paints and glitter! Needless to say, the kids thought it was so neat to use other tools to paint with, other than paint brushes. This week we focused on the letter W, for winter and walrus. We all enjoyed learing fun facts about the walrus and then created our own walrus paper bag puppets. As always, I like to jazz things up a bit and find creative ways to form our letters. We used tissue paper and glue to make our W, starting always at the top! We then decorated them with winter themed stickers. Since we entered this new season of winter, I thought it would be fun to graph our favorite season. Overall, it may have been a short week but still a fun week. Enjoy your weekend!

Mrs. Gilberti