Happy New Year & welcome back! We hope everyone had a wonderful break. Everyone came back to school with smiles and excitement to see their friends😃. Now it’s time to jump into 2025!! Time is flying by, and our Ladybugs are growing up quickly. It seems that some have grown taller in just a few weeks, and we noticed that many are becoming more independent in doing things like getting dressed for the playground and opening snacks. And as they are ready, we are adding some new challenges in the classroom each week.
For example, we have begun making patterns with our calendar numbers (because our number sets have 2 sets of pictures to choose from). Everyone has done so well with name recognition, so we will begin focusing more on learning the individual letters in their names and practice making the letters using various tools, too (for example- playdough, craft sticks, blocks and, of course, writing tools). We also changed the sit spots on the carpet to number spots to sneak in a little numeral recognition.
Not only have the children changed, but we talked about how the year & season have changed as well. We learned a song, “It’s a New Year, Yes it Is!”, and had a parade to celebrate. Everyone was very excited about the possibility of snow this weekend, so we talked a lot about winter and snow, too. We practiced using scissors to cut out snowflakes to turn our classroom into a winter wonderland! We also made snowball (marshmallow) sculptures and had an indoor snowball fight (they particularly delighted in nailing us, the teachers 🤣) There were some great throws and lots of work on eye-hand coordination! Some explored how paint sticks glided across shiny foil- kind of like the paint sticks were skating on ice. We rolled dice to match the numbers on a snowman. Some friends counted the dots and found the number. Children who weren’t ready for that challenge simply rolled the numeral dice to match numbers.
You really need to check out our picture album to see many of the fun activities that were not packable to take home! Here are a few:
We had a new friend join our T/Th class! His name is Ogada, and it was his birthday this week, too so we celebrated his first day with a birthday party. Hooray!! Welcome to the Ladybugs, Ogada and family.
Our 1/2 Birthday celebrations have begun, too. We celebrated Mary’s 3 1/2 yr old birthday on Thursday 😁 🎉
And finally, Lunch Bunch began this week!! Wow…so much excitement for 1 week. We really had fun.
Well, as I finish this it has REALLY begun snowing!! Yay!
We hope you have “snow” much fun with your Ladybug this weekend!!
