What a joyful occasion it was this past Tuesday when our class visited Ridgeview Nursing Home. The boys and girls were so excited, and I know that their smiling faces just brightened the residents' day so much! We sang a few songs such as "This Little Light of Mine" and "Jesus Loves Me." We passed out bookmarks that some of the younger children at CASA had made and we walked through the halls and visited many rooms, passing out flowers and visiting with the residents. The innocense and sweet words that your children shared with those men and women brought tears to my eyes! God is so good!

Fairy Tales!

I hope that everyone has had a restful weekend and is enjoying the cooler weather upon us! Rain is a good thing!

We had a great week at CASA last week! We began our Fairy Tale unit and focused on Bears and the letter F for Fairy Tales. We read several different versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. One of the favorites was about a little girl named Dustylocks who was always very dirty and hated to take baths! We did lots of writing in our journals and are getting so good at writing our names, the date, and even putting words on our paper. We have some budding artists upon us for sure! We pulled out the playdough at center time this week, which was a huge hit! Patterning and sorting was our focus in math this week, along with counting and number identification with a fun game of Number Bingo!

I loved seeing so many of your faces at Parent Night on Thursday night! Hopefully you learned a little about what we do each day. Please don't hesitate to call or email if you have questions.

Next week is going to be very busy! We are going on our first field trip to Ridgeview Nursing Home on Tuesday. You all should have seen a permission slip in your child's folder on Friday. Please sign it and return it tomorrow. If you are planning on going on the trip with us, you can just walk your child in that morning. We'll be leaving soon after carpool.

DON'T FORGET>>> Please have your child decorate their brown bear that came home last week. Please return it this week so that we can share them and display them in our classroom.

>>>This coming Friday is Bear Day. Please have your child bring a stuffed teddy bear from home. We'll be doing all kinds of bear activities with them.

>>>We will also be doing a graphing activity this week with Teddy Grahams. I need one box of chocolate Teddy Grahams, one box of cinnamon Teddy Grahams, and one box of regular Teddy Grahams. If you can send in a box to share, just email me and let me know. Thanks so much!

Brooks was our star student last week and we loved learning more about him! Have a great afternoon!

In Full Swing

Well, we made it through our first full week of school at CASA and it has been full of excitement!! We have continued getting to know one another and have been learning "All About Me." We celebrated Lou's birthday on Monday and had a special visit from his mom and brother, who brought cookie cake to share! We drew family portraits and read all kinds of great new books! The kids have also really gotten the hang of our center rotations as well. I started working with small groups focusing at this point on letter identification and sounds.

Our letter of the week this week was M for "Me!" They came up with so many M words and were excited to find new M words during our Shared Reading each day and throughout the classroom.

One of the most exciting parts of our week was the visit we had from a real author. Her name is Sheila Booth-Alberstadt. She wrote the book, Maggie McNair Has Spiders in Her Hair. She read it to us and told us all about what it is like to be an author with published books. You should have received a hand out in your child's folder with more information about her upcoming book signings.

We made Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom trees after reading that story and we also are going to graph how many letters are in our names, after we have read the book Chrysanthemum.

Don't Forget... Parent night is next Thursday night at 6:00- adults only please.

We will begin our unit on Fairy Tales next week and will be studying the letter F!

Welcome to our classroom!

First days of school

It has been an exceptionally smooth first few days at CASA! I have loved getting to know my sweet class- all 12 boys and 3 girls! I can already tell that it's going to be a fun group of kids! We started out this week by getting to know one another and getting to know our school.

We've read some great stories this week such as Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten, If You Take a Mouse to School, Kindergarten Here I Come, and The Kissing Hand. We also heard a story about The Monster Who Went to School. The students helped to come up with a list of rules that monsters should follow when they're at school, which led right into the rules that we have for our classroom and school. They've done well with those so far and have been really excited to be able to earn "Super Stars" when I catch them making good choices!

We had Bible class with Ms. Gina, Movement with Ms. Judy, Computer with Ms. Meg and Ms. Shannon, Science with Ms. Lisa, and have Music with Ms. Autumn on Friday. The kids always love our special classes and this year is going to be no exception!

A few things to remember... Thursday, Sept. 23 will be our Pre-K parent night. This is for parents only please!
*If you have a ribbon, bag tag, key chain, or something easily identifiable that you could stick on your child's backpack, it would be very helpful when we pack up. Even though their names are on the bags, we are still having lots of mix ups!
*Thanks for being patient during the 2:00 carpool! Most of you know by now- if you have siblings, they will go to extended care for 30 minutes at no charge to you. You do have to come in and get your other child or children though. Please just arrive a couple of minutes before 2:00, so that you can run in and get them while I get my class ready to load!
*Thanks for all of you who signed up to volunteer, be room mom, and chaperone fieldtrips. I will create a volunteer calendar and will be in touch with you all.

Please let me know how you like the blog! This is new to me, but I hope that it will be an easy way for me to communicate to you all that is going on in our room. I will also put pictures on here occasionally of things we're doing. Please let me know if you don't want your child's picture posted.