News from Miss Maria November This Weeks Concepts This Week... We continued our study on community helpers and learned about how construction workers, doctors, dentists, veterinarians, and teachers help us each day. This week we learned that doctors who help animals when they are sick are called vets. We had a lot of fun pretending to be vets in our classroom! We helped sick animals get well by listening to their heartbeats with stethoscopes, bandaging their cuts and scrapes and giving them shots. We had fun naming animals and also identifying parts of the animals bodies in our pretend vet clinic. We compared and counted body parts and discovered that most animals have two eyes just like us but many of them have four legs! Many animals have more legs than we have. We have several friends in our class who are particularly good at making a variety of animal noises! We learned the dentist helps us to keep our teeth healthy. We read a book about the dentist and learned that he or she usually has a very special chair for patients to sit in that moves. We made special pictures during OT group and used glue to place teeth inside of the mouth. We also had so much fun going through an obstacle course where we had to brush gigantic teeth and floss pretend teeth at the end! Construction workers are people who help build things for us like our houses and our roads. We had a great time reading about the vehicles they use to move dirt and haul large objects. In the sensory table the students had the opportunity to pretend to work on a job site. They enjoyed scooping the sand and filling the special vehicles around the site. We also learned that teachers are people who help us learn. The read us stories, count with us, write with us, and play with us. Some friends pretended to be teachers in the classroom as they pretended to read books aloud and sang familiar songs. 3s Week ending November Learning Centers Cars/blocks: Bus tent, wooden and cardboard blocks, community helper figurines, trucks, cars, community center, doll houses Feeling Table: Construction area bulldozers pick up trucks sand gravel shovels Math Center: Tangrams Dramatic Play: Doctors Office/Workbench Playdoh Center: Brown Playdoh Writing Center: Chalk, crayons, markers, dry erase boards, paper Quiet Cozy Reading Center: plush couch, bean bag, books, stuffed animals Jefferson Early Childhood Center 130 N. Hazelton Ave. Wheaton, IL Math: Completing AB patterns, Sorting objects by color, oral counting to 5 and 1:1 correspondence Color of the Month: Brown Literacy: Turing individual pages of books, pointing to named pictures in books Social/Emotional: Pretend play skills Vocabulary: Big, Little, On Top, Inside, outside, vet, veterinarian, doctor, dentist, animal, teeth, legs, eyes, floss, more Upcoming Events November 25 th through 29 th – NO SCHOOL Thanksgiving Recess Tuesday, December 3 rd School Resumes Thanks so much for all you do! Have a great weekend! ~Maria I hope that everyone enjoys a safe and happy Thanksgiving Break!