Remote Learning - Week of December 20, 2021

Good Evening PreK-3 Families,

Everyone should have received Mr Dunnigan's Alert earlier this evening regarding School Closure for 12/20 and 12/23 and Remote Instruction for 12/21 and 12/22.  If you did not receive the alert please notify me as well as the main office as soon as possible.

Mr. Dunnigan is NOT aware of any Positive Covid cases in our PreK-3 class as of right now so it is safe to assume that your child is NOT a direct contact of any positive cases from our class.  

We are so disappointed to have to do this but sadly it is in everyone's best interest to keep as many of our students healthy and safe from this awful disease as possible.  

Since we only had two days of school (regular 3 day PreK-3 with me) scheduled for this week, we are really only losing Monday as a school day.  Wednesday will be a virtual day.  Virtual PreK-3 is completely optional as I know screen time can be a challenge with older students learning from home as well as parents working from home.  

What we will do is a hybrid approach to virtual learning.  I will leave materials out for you to pick up after 9:00am at school tomorrow.  I will have two gray bins labeled PreK-3 outside the Learning Center doors.  In the bins, you will find a paper bag labeled with your child's name.  In each bag will be the materials your child needs for Wednesday as well as a little Christmas Gift from Mrs McDonald and I if your child wasn't in school on Friday.  Children who were in school on Friday already took theirs home. (I am assuming that everyone has their own glue stick and crayons at home.  If you need either from school, please let me know and I will add them to your bag.)

I will record a little lesson for your child to watch and work along with me to complete.  I will send out a YouTube link with this lesson in an email once I am done recording and uploading it.   Your child can complete the lesson at any time.  Mrs Mc Donald and I will also be holding a live Zoom session for our little ones.  This will be an interactive session where we will play games, sing our Christmas Songs and have a little Show and Tell.  Please have your child bring something (FREE CHOICE) to our Zoom session to share with their friends.  Since this is going to be so new to them, we will just play things by ear.  I will send out the Zoom Link with the YouTube link in an email on Tuesday.   Let's plan on Wednesday, 12/22, at 10:00 to Zoom.  It should probably only last for about 30 minutes or so.  I don't think our little munchkins will last much longer than that.

I truly wish we could just be in person but unfortunately these are the times we are living in now.  Let's all continue to pray for an end to this pandemic.  

Thank you for your understanding and continued support,

Paula Dobres

Week of December 20, 2021

🎵 We Wish You a Merry Christmas! 🎵

Christmas pajamas were so much fun to wear to school!

We read about a really mean King, "Yertle the Turtle!"  Ask your little one all about him!

Our Nativity Scenes came out so beautifully!  

Thank you Mrs S. for donating the stickers!  We had so much fun with them!

WE WENT OUTSIDE TO PLAY IN THE GORGEOUS WEATHER!!!!

We worked on the first step of a special craft!

It will be coming home next week!

Patterning was so much fun!

We worked on our fine motor skills to give Rudolph red noses!

Sorting is so cool!

Christmas Show and Tell was awesome!!!

We LOVE playtime!!!

Be sure to ask your little one all about kangaroos and to use their body's to show you how to make a K!

🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

Mrs. McDonald and I would like to wish  you a very 

Merry Christmas and a New Year full of happiness and blessings!

Our VIRTUAL Parent/Teacher Conferences will be on January 24th.  I will email everyone directions to sign up for a 15 minute slot.

This Week's Focus will be on:
Letter of the Week: Kk
Number of the Month: 4
Color of the Month:  Blue
Shape of the Month:  Star
December Themes:  Counting 0-4, Sorting, AB Patterns, Christmas, Kindness, Feelings, Winter,                                           Name Recognition
Religion:  Sign of the Cross, Simple Prayers, Grace before meals, Christmas, "Jesus is Born," Advent

Show & Tell:  No Show and Tell this week... it's Christmas Eve on Friday!!!

Dates to Remember:

December 23rd: NOON DISMISSAL for all students- No After School Care
December 24- January 2nd: NO SCHOOL - Christmas Break

January 3rd:  School reopens

January 17th:  NO SCHOOL:  Martin Luther King Jr Day

January 24th:  Virtual Parent Conferences

January 30th-Feb 5th:  Catholic Schools Week

Have a great Christmas break,

Paula Dobres  

Week of December 13, 2021

Our Christmas Show was nothing short of Magical!  Thank you for sharing this special night with us and making memories that I hope you will hang onto for a long time to come!

We are so proud of each and every one of our sweet little angels, including the ones who were not able to attend.  All of our little friends worked so hard to learn their songs and delivered a wonderful performance!  I honestly couldn't be more proud of them!

We have been practicing finding own own names and placing them on our attendance tree.

J is for Jaguar

We loved decorating our Class Christmas Tree!

Master Builders back at it!  This is our tallest creation yet!!!

Be sure to check out the adorable ornaments that we hung on our Learning Center Christmas Tree right outside our front door!

J is for jellyfish!  Ask your little stinger to demonstrate what jelly fish do with their tentacles!  

4 is for sure so cool to paint, write and count.  Ask your little mathematician to show you four fingers!

We did such a great job sewing our Christmas Stockings!

Our Stockings are now on display on our PreK-3 Fireplace Mantel!

Show and Tell Fridays continue to be a HUGE HIT!  Our public speaking skills have developed so incredibly well!  We continue to be so surprised with our little presenters!!!

Making Memories....

(took a lot of behind the scenes hard work! lol)

  

A GREAT BIG THANK YOU to Mrs. McDonald for all of her hard work helping us prepare for this special night including (but definitely not limited to) providing all the yummy cookies for both shows and making an emergency trip to Lowes to pick up more lights and light clips!!  She worked a 13 hour work day with a bright smile on her face even though I know (without her ever complaining) that she had frozen, throbbing feet and an aching back!  She didn't stop all day doing whatever needed to be done to make the Shows run as smoothly as possible!  I CANNOT FIND THE WORDS TO EXPRESS MY ENORMOUS GRATITUDE!!  We LOVE YOU Mrs. McDonald!

Mrs. Matthews is also due an enormous thank you for providing and preparing the delicious hot chocolate for both shows.  She was the behind the scenes master chef boiling and mixing three crock pots full of her special recipe hot chocolate!  Our room still has a chocolate cloud floating about!  Of course her contributions went well above and beyond her barista skills... she was the glue that held the PreK-4 performance together in the unexpected absence of their classroom teacher.  Great Job Mrs. Matthews!  The Shows wouldn't have been a success without all of your hard work and dedication!  

An enormous thank you also goes out to our teenage helpers:  Mrs Matthews' son, Mrs Reed's daughter and friend, and my daughter and her friends!  It certainly is a special sight to see all these hard working teens give up a Friday Night to come help our STS Preschool Community!

And lastly, I would like to thank my husband for rescheduling his work commitments to make time to come to STS to hang all our beautiful Christmas Lights and for setting up our Snowman!  I know it wasn't easy to do especially during this time of the year!  Thank you for making our stage look so magical and for spreading your unparalleled holiday cheer!

 

Weekly Recap:  What a week!  We worked so hard preparing for our Christmas Show while still keeping up with our school work.  Letter Jj was no joke... we learned about jaguars, jellyfish and had a blast with our jack-in-the-box!

A Sneak Peek at Our Upcoming Week: We will be focusing on letter Kk, patterning, graphing as well as continuing to work on our December Themes.

Our VIRTUAL Parent/Teacher Conferences will be in January.  More information will be coming  in the upcoming weeks. 

This Week's Focus will be on:
Letter of the Week: Kk
Number of the Month: 4
Color of the Month:  Blue
Shape of the Month:  Star
December Themes:  Counting 0-4, Sorting, AB Patterns, Christmas, Kindness, Feelings, Winter,                                           Name Recognition
Religion:  Sign of the Cross, Simple Prayers, Grace before meals, Christmas, "Jesus is Born," Advent

Show & Tell:  Friday, December 17th -  CHRISTMAS THEME!!  Bring in ONE CHRISTMASSY THING you'd like in to Show and Tell our friends about!  And don't forget to wear your PAJAMAS for Tag Day!

Dates to Remember:

December 17th: TAG DAY:  CHRISTMAS PAJAMAS

December 23rd: NOON DISMISSAL for all students- No After School Care
December 24- January 2nd: NO SCHOOL - Christmas Break

January 3rd:  School reopens

January 17th:  NO SCHOOL:  Martin Luther King Jr Day

January 30th-Feb 5th:  Catholic Schools Week

Hope you enjoyed our Christmas Show!

Paula Dobres  

Week of December 6, 2021

We came back from our Thanksgiving Weekend to this amazing piece of mail!!!

We have some incredible but not too surprising news...  

All of our little PreK-3 sweethearts made it onto Santa's NICE List!!!!

And we got a very special letter from Santa too!!  What a wonderful surprise!  

Ask your little sweetheart all about it!  

(ssshhh!!! A great big thank you to Mrs. F. for all of her behind the scenes work to make this possible!)

We loved making our reindeer and asking Santa for a (well deserved) Christmas gift! 

We love learning about Baby Jesus' Birthday! 

We worked on our beautiful Winter Trees!  They are now on display in our classroom!

Paint and Glitter are the BEST!

We also painted and GLITTERED our 3D shining stars!  

They are now sparkling up our classroom sky! 

ssshhhhh!!!!!  Don't ask too many questions about these... They are part of a special surprise!

I is for Icky Insects!

Our adorable angels are now on display in our Learning Center Hallway Gallery!

Glitter, Glitter, Glitter!!!!!

i is for iguana!

We learned about igloos too!  Ask your little scientists about some interesting igloo facts!

Weekly Recap:  Who knew we had so many kind little angels in our class?!?  Our gifts of kindness box is really filling up quickly!  Thank you for participating at home as well.  Please keep the slips coming throughout the Advent season!  

We learned something new about our little artists this week... THEY ALL  LOVE GLITTER!!!!!  (They had no idea that we were working on their fine motor development as they glittered the days away!)

We had fun learning letter Ii and cool facts about insects, iguanas and igloos!  And as if on cue, Mother Nature sent us snow flurries for us right before we made our Winter Trees!!! 

 A Sneak Peek at Our Upcoming Week: This upcoming week is going to be equally messy and fun as last week!  Be sure to ask your little artist all about his/her mystery stains on their clothes and hands.  We do our best to clean up after all our fun, but some things are a little harder to remove than others so please continue to dress your child in washable play clothes during our regular school days, especially this week...  We will be reading lots of Christmas books, practicing our songs, learning different versions of The Gingerbread Man, working on letter Jj and number 4 among many other things!

Christmas Show:  We are so excited for our Show on December 10th!  PreK-3 will perform at 5:00pm so please arrive between 4:45 and 5:00.  We will begin promptly at 5:00 to allow enough time between our show and PreK-4's performance.  Our show will be short but very sweet.  Our little carolers can't wait to sing our songs for you!!  Attendance at our performance is of course completely optional but kindly let me know if your family chooses not to attend.  Also, in the event of inclement weather, we will communicate a rain/snow date as soon as possible.  

Our VIRTUAL Parent/Teacher Conferences will be in January.  More information will be coming  in the upcoming weeks. 

This Week's Focus will be on:
Letter of the Week: Jj 
Number of the Month: 4
Color of the Month:  Blue
Shape of the Month:  Star
December Themes:  Counting 0-4, Sorting, AB Patterns, Christmas, Kindness, Feelings, Winter,                                           Name Recognition
Religion:  Sign of the Cross, Simple Prayers, Grace before meals, Christmas, "Jesus is Born," Advent

Show & Tell:  Friday, December 10th -  FREE CHOICE WEEK AGAIN!!  Bring in ONE THING you'd like in to Show and Tell our friends about!

Dates to Remember:

🎄🎄December 10th:  EVENING CHRISTMAS SHOW!!  🎄🎄

December 17th: TAG DAY:  CHRISTMAS PAJAMAS

December 23rd: NOON DISMISSAL for all students- No After School Care
December 24- January 2nd: NO SCHOOL - Christmas Break

January 3rd:  School reopens

January 17th:  NO SCHOOL:  Martin Luther King Jr Day

January 30th-Feb 5th:  Catholic Schools Week

Hope you have a joyous week!

Paula Dobres