Pre- K Highlights
January 2016
Happy New Year! I hope the new year is off to a good start for everyone. We are at the
midpoint of the school year and the Pre-K students are continuing to grow and learn in amazing
ways! The students practice using their social-emotional skills every day in the Pre-K classroom
as they cooperate with each other, are kind to one another and are responsible and ready to learn.
We recently finished our unit on Our Community. The children learned about the
different places in the community, how community helpers contribute to the community, and
about different kinds of transportation in the community. We briefly discussed the idea of taking
care of our community through keeping it clean, recycling items that can be recycled and reusing materials. We will revisit this idea in more depth in the spring as we learn about Earth
Day.
Now we are learning about Amazing Animals! The children have learned about some
different kinds of animals and discussed their characteristics. Your Pre-K student is able to tell
you the fastest animal, the biggest animal and the tallest animal. Ask him or her! They have
learned that animals have basic needs such as food, water and shelter just like people need food,
water and shelter. One day they were able to have a pet for the day and were responsible for
caring for a pet during the school day. They know it is an important responsibility to pay
attention to animals, take care of their needs, and be kind to them because our pets need love,
too. The students have learned that a habitat is a place where an animal lives and different
animals have different habitats. We will be learning about insects and then we will learn about
how animals grow and change to finish our unit on animals by the end of January. In this unit,
the students are developing many science skills including identifying the needs of living things.
The next unit we will study after we finish with Amazing Animals will require us to use
our imaginations in “Imagine it! Make it!” The sky will be the limit!
The Pre-K students continue to work on the goals of identifying letters and matching the
sound to the consonant. We will begin to work with rhyming words and the beginning sounds of
words to build those pre-reading skills through the second semester. Most of the children are
doing a fabulous job writing their names now and many are copying words to finish sentences as
part of our weekly writing. It is great to see all the progression in their learning!
In math, the students are counting sets of objects to 10 and making sets of objects for the
numbers 1-5. They are working on putting sets together and taking them apart to build a
foundation for learning addition and subtraction. This is something you may help with at home.
If your child is having a snack, you may give him 3 crackers and then give 1 more and ask how
many he has all together. Right! You have four crackers! Then after your child eats 2 crackers,
say, “You had 4 crackers and you ate 2. How many are left? Work with numbers between 1 and
5, but if your child is ready for a bigger challenge, by all means go up to 10. Use objects that
children can manipulate, such as crackers, cereal, tokens, blocks, and toys. This is not meant to
be a paper and pencil task. Have fun!
Thank you to the parents who attended the field trip to Imagination Stage to see “Wake
Up, Brother Bear!” It was a great show! The Sargent Shriver Pre-K students represented our
school so well by being so well-behaved and such wonderful audience members for the show. I
am very proud of all of them!
Monday, January 25, 2016 is a Professional Day for teachers and no school for students.
Pre-K progress reports will come home by the end of February.
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Sargent Shriver Elementary School wants to keep our parents informed. We use
Microsoft Word to translate our notes home to you. If our translated documents are
hard to understand, please contact the office at 301-929-4426. Thank you.