Family Unit October 6-10

Save The Date: Back to School Night October 15 at 6:30

Families Theme
Children will be exploring and talking about families and the many different ways families relate to and help one another. Through the Story Time books, children will hear about a boy who helps his family take care of his baby sister, a boy who realizes how much he has grown when a new baby arrives, a girl who behaves badly when she want attention, and a lonely stuffed bear who finds a new friend. Besides listening to stories, children will begin to recognize initial sounds in words and identify rhyming words as they build vocabulary and comprehension skills. They will also be participating in a variety of music, poetry, mathematics, science, and art activities during Center Time and in Small Groups.
Theme Concepts:
*Family members have role names: mother, father, sister, and so on.
*Some family members live together; some live in other places but are still family members.
*Grown-ups in a family take care of the children. Younger children need more care. Older children can help take care of younger brothers and sisters.
*Children sometimes get angry at parents and may feel that their parents don't love them as much as their siblings.
*Sometimes grown-ups in a family don't like things that children do and tell them to stop or be quiet.
*Families do things together that are fun.

Books This Week:
Noisy Nora byRosemary Wells
Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems
Whistle for Willie by Ezra Jack Keats

Small Groups:
-Alphabet Train Letter Matching- We will match uppercase letters to create a train. The trains will look like paint chips to remind us of painting Peter's Chair
-Sound Cans- We will be listening to objects in a can and try to guess what the object is by listening to the sound.  We will then cut and paste to create a chart to show our results.
-Beginning Letter Sounds- Using unit vocabulary words we will listen to the initial sound in words then identify the letter that beginnings the word to create a small letter book.
-Math- Ordinals- Which bear is first? We will color then place bears on a road and talk about ordinal position (first, second, third, fourth, fifth).
-Unit Vocabulary Books- We will continue to create unit 1 vocab books by matching and writing uppercase letters.


Centers
-Dramatic Play- Laundromat- Related to Knuffle Bunny.  We will look for Knuffle Bunny in the washing machine like in the story
-Sensory Table- Marble Mazes
-Art Table- Paint exploration/airplane making
-Writing- unit words
-Blocks- Block Play with dogs to make them home
-Math/Manipulative- Puzzles and Paint Chips
-Science- Mirrors to look for our reflections
-Library- Reading to babies

Let's Talk About It
-Time for Bed book
-Paper Airplanes and other folded paper objects
-Mixing paint and paint chips (related to Peter's chair)
-Cook Books and Recipes (related to Noisy Nora; when she follows a recipe with her mom)

Songs, Word Play, and Letters
-Syllables in words (our names, character names, unit words)
-Rhyming Words Song
-Dr. Jean Alphabet
-Down by the Bay
-If your name starts with ____ raise your hand, jump, clap your hands (following directions game)

Handwriting
-We will be continuing our color books for the Handwriting Without Tears Curriculum. We will focus on proper grasp holding our stubby crayons. We are working on our color and shape books.

Preschool Life Skills
We are continuing to review our previous skills 1-2.
1-When a teacher calls your name, stop, look and say, "Yes".
2-When a teacher tells you to do something, do it "Right Away".

We will continue our new skill this week:
3-When a teacher tells you to do 2 things, do it "Right Away".(multi-step directions)

Social Thinking- We have been discussing our feeling by talking about thought bubbles.  We have been working on thinks that make us feel happy, sad, mad, and scared.