August 31-September 3, 2009

WOW! What a great first week we had! Everyone did really well transitioning into our class. Several other member of the His Kids team even said they could not believe it was only the first week with how well both of our 2's classes were doing! Such a huge compliment to your kids!!

First, thank you very much for all the items that were donated from our wish list. We greatly appreciate ALL donations made to our classroom! Also, thank you very much for working on our Make and Takes! Our Make and Take wall looks great! The children love to show off their work from home! These are such a great opportunity for the whole family to work on projects together!

Our unit this week was School Days and Making new friends!

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.

1 John 4:7

Our bible story this week was The Story and the Song taken from The Jesus Storybook Bible.
We will typically use The Beginner's Bible for our bible stories though.
We read several books this week. Our main focus was The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn.

When we do our Circle Time, each child sits on an animal. This sweet friend realized that one of the animals on our rug is a raccoon and thought that Chester the raccoon needed to sit on this animal during our Circle Time....too cute!

Everyone was introduced to Dude our weather helping frog during Circle Time. If your child comes home saying that "Dude, took his clothes off today!" please don't be alarmed. We get Dude dressed in the morning after we come in from outside.

We also had fun singing lots of new songs and doing some fun dances in our Circle Time!Every week we participate in gymnastics (Monday and Wednesday) and music class (Tuesday and Thursday) our class was given several compliments of how well everyone did.

We have a Compliment (very fun word for them to try to say) Jar in our class. Once the jar is filled up with compliments we will get to have a party in our class! We already have 4 compliments on our jar!!! We are off to a wonderful start!

Everyone did really well doing center rotations this week. If your child attended His Kids last year, this is something that is done very different for our Toddler class. Your child will be paired up with a Center Buddy and we will rotate buddies from center to center. We do not do "open" or "free" centers in our classroom. Some of our centers this week were:

Our Library Center, where not only The Kissing Hand, Chester, and the flannel board were available to work with. We also had several 'back to school' themed books available to read!

We also worked in a Number Study Center where the kids worked on putting the correct number of "kisses" on pictures of Chester!
In our Dramatic Play Center we worked on matching Velcro food pieces together.We worked on our colors in our Pocket Chart center.In our Fine Motor Center we worked on these pegs.
In our Art Center we made our hand prints for a Friendship Wreath that will hang from our door for the next few weeks and stamped hand to go along with The Kissing Hand!We also had lots of fun playing in our Transportation Center.

Everyone seemed to enjoy our Sensory Table the most, it always seems to be the "favorite" center! The children were asked to find the school object in the rice and them sort them according to the pictures on the poster. They LOVED this!

We feel like we have the BEST schedule of all the classes at His Kids, for one reason,our playground time starts at 9:15. We are able to enjoy our time outside before it gets hot! Here are some cute pictures of the kids just enjoying being at school!This last pic, I just had to include because it was just too stinkin' cute not to!
As always...if you ever have ANY questions or concerns please let us know!

Blessings!

Cassie and Jen

A few reminders

Here are few reminders to help our class run smoothly! Thank you so much in advance for helping us out in these areas!

* Please do not let your child come into our class with a "lovey" if they are experiencing separation anxiety. Please let us try to console them first. We promise we are going to take good care of them and if we feel we need to get it, we will get it from their basket.

* We need ALL lunch and snack items to be in a disposable container. The children clean up their own spot and this helps them out tremendously.

*If you have not already purchased a His Kids Tote, please see Heather or Suzanne in the office. The school handbook does say that every student in the school needs this tote.

*Don't forget to sign your child in and out every day.

*Dismissal is from 2:20-2:30. Please pick up your child during this time. We understand that things can happen from time to time. But, please remember that we both have children in other schools and we need to prepare to pick them up, we greatly appreciate you being on time!

I think that is all the reminders we have right now!

Stay tuned, we are working on a post for the first week of school!

Jen and Cassie