Monthly Archives: September 2023

Dino Week, part 2!

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Hello PreKPals and Families-

What an exciting week we had in PreK! We did so many fun science experiments, went on a dino “dig”, made dinosaur tails and hats, learned about different dinosaurs and what they ate! So much fun! We will continue the dino-mite fun this week as well!

In Heggerty phonics this week our Nursery Rhyme is Humpty Dumpty. We are sending a copy home for you to enjoy with your child. We are loving our weekly Nursery Rhymes! This week we will move from name recognition (our own names and those of our friends) to focusing on a few letters (uppercase and lowercase) and their sounds. This will be a spiraling thing (meaning we will get to the end and begin again, and we will continue to review past letters and sounds.) We will begin with the letters Mm and Oo and we invite you to begin working on letter recognition with these letters and practicing the sounds they make as well. In math, we are still working on recognizing numbers 0-10 and we are going to focus on patterns this week as well.

Please return your health screening signature sheet if you haven’t already done so. If your child is taking the flu vaccine at school, (we recommend this be done at the pediatrician’s office instead) also return that form.

Links for practice at home:

Weekly Reminders:

  • A water cup with a valve, already filled with water (flavored water must be clear!), labeled with your child’s name. Make sure your child can drink from it at home before coming to school. NO OPEN POUR CUPS. NO JUICE!!!
  • Your child’s backpack and lunch box (if they will not eat from the cafeteria).
  • A bag with 5 snacks labeled with your child’s name. Please do not pack snacks in the lunchboxes.
  • Nap Mat
  • PreK binder (this will need to be checked and cleaned out daily)

Dates to Remember:

Immediately: Please do the ASQ for your child. This is a requirement for PreK.

https://www.asqonline.com/family/989e71 (English)

https://www.asqonline.com/family/cbc71c (Spanish)

September:

25: Health Screening Signatures due

25: Barnyard chaperoning forms due

28: Northridge Homecoming Parade

29: School Picture Day

October:

9: No School for students

10-13: Book Fair (information coming home soon)

11: RockFest

19-20: NO SCHOOL FOR PREK STUDENTS ONLY (The PreK teachers are going to be at a required state conference in Mobile)

26: Barnyard Fieldtrip

Please email or message on ClassDojo if you have any questions! Thank you for sharing your children with us! They are precious!!

Alicia Jenne: ajenne@tusc.k12.al.us

Whitney Dunn: wdunn@tusc.k12.al.us

Thank you so much for the donations we have received from our wish list! We appreciate every bit!

Here are the links for our class wishlist and our DonorsChoose project if you would like to contribute. Participation is optional!

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/dl/invite/cmCXG7d?ref_=wl_share

Little Authors….Lots of Books! | DonorsChoose project by Mrs. J.

Have an amazing week!

Alicia Jenne’

 

 

Dinosaurs!

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Hello PreKPals and Families-

This week is all about DINOSAURS! We are super excited to use some new center materials and to turn our Home Living/Pretend Center into a Dinosaur Dig! We have some fun “fossils” and kenetic sand, some dino hats and tails, and some dino glasses! It is going to be awesome!

In Heggerty phonics this week our Nursery Rhyme is Three Little Kittens. We are sending a copy home for you to enjoy with your child. Is your child recognizing rhyming words yet? Can they give you a word that rhymes when you provide a word? Try making rhyming words as you drive around town and wait for ball practices to begin!

Last week, we finished up our senses unit with some messy play! We used shaving cream and foamy finger paints! Everyone loved it! We still have a few friends who cry if their hands have the tiniest spot of paint or marker on them. These friends want to wash their hands between every piece of paper that they glue. Encourage your children that messy play is OK! We love that they want to stay clean, but when the fear of a spot of marker on their hands before the activity is finished is overtaking their thoughts, we need to work on that. I want to encourage you to let your child get messy! Make mud pies, play in shaving cream, dig in the dirt! It will be good for their development and their nerves.

We will still be working on scissor skills and writing skills every week so I will leave these links. I will add other links from time to time so you will always have a library at your fingertips. This week’s new link is for home made playdoh! Try it and get messy with your child!

Links for practice at home:

Everyone did a great job with the health screening last week. Please sign the top sheet and keep the 2 stapled papers for your records. Sign and return the top sheet (sign in the grey area that says you have received your results). Return those to school tomorrow. If you did not receive your results, that means you opted out of the screening altogether. Thanks for helping us keep our paperwork in order.

We had a blast with our popcorn day on Friday! It was super fun doing science with all of our PreKPals and friends!

Weekly Reminders:

  • A water cup with a valve, already filled with water (flavored water must be clear!), labeled with your child’s name. Make sure your child can drink from it at home before coming to school. NO OPEN POUR CUPS. NO JUICE!!!
  • Your child’s backpack and lunch box (if they will not eat from the cafeteria).
  • A bag with 5 snacks labeled with your child’s name. Please do not pack snacks in the lunchboxes.
  • Nap Mat
  • PreK binder (this will need to be checked and cleaned out daily)

Dates to Remember:

Immediately: Please do the ASQ for your child. This is a requirement for PreK.

https://www.asqonline.com/family/989e71 (English)

https://www.asqonline.com/family/cbc71c (Spanish)

September:

18: Health Screening Signatures due

28: Northridge Homecoming Parade

29: School Picture Day

October:

9: No School for students

19-20: NO SCHOOL FOR PREK STUDENTS ONLY (The PreK teachers are going to be at a required state conference in Mobile)

26: Barnyard Fieldtrip

Please email or message on ClassDojo if you have any questions! Thank you for sharing your children with us! They are precious!!

Alicia Jenne: ajenne@tusc.k12.al.us

Whitney Dunn: wdunn@tusc.k12.al.us

Here are the links for our class wishlist and our DonorsChoose project if you would like to contribute. Participation is optional!

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/dl/invite/cmCXG7d?ref_=wl_share

Little Authors….Lots of Books! | DonorsChoose project by Mrs. J.

Have an amazing week!

Alicia Jenne’

 

 

PopCorn Week!

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Hello PreKPals and Families-

Can you believe that we have been in PreK for a whole month?

This week will be a busy week! On Wednesday we will have our health screening. Thursday will be our music class and our first guidance class with Mrs. Chandler. We will be finishing up our unit on our bodies and the 5 senses with a popcorn science experiment with all our PreKPal friends in all classes on Friday!

In Heggerty phonics this week we will be reviewing our last 4 weeks of Nursery Rhymes. The PreKPals love it when we substitute their name for one in the story. For instance, Little Miss Harper sat on her tuffet……. Try doing that with the names of your family members and friends! Everyone has most of the Rhymes down pat except for maybe “Old Mother Hubbard”. Try working on that one a little more this week at home. Nursery Rhymes are so fun because you can do them while you are driving down the road, waiting in line at CVS, or in the waiting room at the dentist. No materials needed!

We worked on cutting skills last week! This is something that you can practice at home! Don’t be afraid! Go ahead and get some Fiskers school scissors and draw some lines on paper. Help your child practice holding the scissors correctly (thumb on top) and make sure they hold their cutting arm to the side of their bodies. We have a sensory bin on our classroom that is specific to cutting. We put thin paper, thick paper, laminated paper, plain paper, paper with lines, magazines, all kinds of things for them to cut. They will need this skill in every other grade in school and it is our job to help them learn it correctly. I’ll post a link that you can watch to help with proper form.

We are finishing our 5 Senses unit this week and will move on to DINOSAURS next week! So fun!

We are going to be working hard to have proper pencil grip with our crayons, markers and pencils. I’ll include a link for that as well.

Links for practice at home:

Weekly Reminders:

  • A water cup with a valve, already filled with water (flavored water must be clear!), labeled with your child’s name. Make sure your child can drink from it at home before coming to school. NO OPEN POUR CUPS. NO JUICE!!!
  • Your child’s backpack and lunch box (if they will not eat from the cafeteria).
  • A bag with 5 snacks labeled with your child’s name. Please do not pack snacks in the lunchboxes.
  • Nap Mat
  • PreK binder (this will need to be checked and cleaned out daily)

Dates to Remember:

Immediately: Please do the ASQ for your child. This is a requirement for PreK.

https://www.asqonline.com/family/989e71 (English)

https://www.asqonline.com/family/cbc71c (Spanish)

September:

13: Health Screening

15: 5 Senses PopCorn Day

28: Northridge Homecoming Parade

29: School Picture Day

October:

9: No School for students

19-20: NO SCHOOL FOR PREK STUDENTS ONLY (The PreK teachers are going to be at a required state conference in Mobile)

26: Barnyard Fieldtrip

Please email or message on ClassDojo if you have any questions! Thank you for sharing your children with us! They are precious!!

Alicia Jenne: ajenne@tusc.k12.al.us

Whitney Dunn: wdunn@tusc.k12.al.us

Have an amazing week!

Alicia Jenne’

 

 

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Hello PreKPals and Families-

This week we have Music and Library (both on Thursday). We will have music weekly for this first semester and library class every other week. For now, the books that we check out remain in the classroom, but soon we will let the PreKPals bring them home for you to enjoy together.

Our Nursery Rhyme this week is Old Mother Hubbard. We are sending a copy home for you to enjoy with your child. We review each Nursery Rhyme weekly. The students love knowing these rhymes and saying them together. We can tell that you are working on them at home as well! A wonderful children’s author, Mem Fox, states in her book called Reading Magic that is written for teachers and parents, “ If a child knows 8 Nursery Rhymes by heart by the time they are 4 years old, the are usually among the best readers and spellers in their class by the time they are 8 years old.” Thank you for helping us to build a strong literacy foundation with our PreKPals.

This week’s theme is the Human Body and the 5 Senses. We are going to go on a Listening Walk for science this week! It will be so much fun! Look for photos of that coming soon!

Thanks to everyone for returning their fieldtrip forms! You are awesome! More information on our trip coming closer to the fieldtrip date, October 26.

It’s going to be another fabulous week in PreK! We hope you enjoyed your long weekend!

Weekly Reminders:

  • A water cup with a valve, already filled with water (flavored water must be clear!), labeled with your child’s name. Make sure your child can drink from it at home before coming to school. NO OPEN POUR CUPS. NO JUICE!!!
  • Your child’s backpack and lunch box (if they will not eat from the cafeteria).
  • A bag with 5 snacks labeled with your child’s name. Please do not pack snacks in the lunchboxes.
  • Nap Mat
  • PreK binder (this will need to be checked and cleaned out daily)

Dates to Remember:

Immediately: Please do the ASQ for your child. This is a requirement for PreK.

https://www.asqonline.com/family/989e71 (English)

https://www.asqonline.com/family/cbc71c (Spanish)

September:

13: Health Screening

15: 5 Senses PopCorn Day

29: School Picture Day

October:

9: No School for students

19-20: NO SCHOOL FOR PREK STUDENTS ONLY (The PreK teachers are going to be at a required state conference in Moblie)

26: Barnyard Fieldtrip

Please email or message on ClassDojo if you have any questions! Thank you for sharing your children with us! They are precious!!

Alicia Jenne: ajenne@tusc.k12.al.us

Whitney Dunn: wdunn@tusc.k12.al.us

Have an amazing week!

Alicia Jenne’