March 2020

If we all wish hard enough, maybe we can get a jump start on MARCH-ing into SPRING!! 

Time is flying by and we have only four months left before the school year is over! It's hard to believe but we still have a lot planned so keep checking your calendars and bulletin boards so you don't miss a thing!!



NOTE: The 4's Skating Party date has been changed to FRIDAY, MARCH 6TH! Please check your emails and bulletin boards for specific times and location.

Please see Calendar of Important Events below.

COVID 19 - There has been a lot in the media regarding Covid 19. Here is a link that will give you more information for British Columbians: http://www.bccdc.ca/Health-Info-Site/Documents/COVID19_schools_childcare_guidelines.pdf

The best thing you can do to help us and your family keep down the spread of Covid 19 and all other communicable diseases that are just as dangerous, is to WASH YOUR HANDS. 

If your child comes down with symptoms such as sore throat, fever, cough, vomiting, stomach cramps, diarrhea or any strange rashes, please KEEP THEM HOME. 

Also, when your child has been away sick, please refrain from sending them back too early. If your child has LOW ENERGY, you should keep them home. If your child is not able to participate in the program, we will call you to pick them up.

When your child is ABSENT, please call or email the preschool to let us know and to tell us why they are absent. If they are SICK, we need to know the SYMPTOMS so we can keep track of what is going through our classrooms. This is very important. 

FUNDRAISING AROUND ST. CATHERINE'S PRESCHOOL

The Card Project - We take your child's art and turn it into beautiful greeting cards! Great for gifts or for the many card-giving occasions throughout the year! You can also order exercise books and sketch books. 

Lovable Labels - Everyone need labels! For lunch kits and food containers, for clothes and for the many other things that we have that need labeling! Go to: www.StCatherines.LoveableLabels.ca

Cobs Bakery - If you shop at the Cobs Bakery in Edgemont Village, when they are ringing you up, tell them you support our preschool and we will get a percentage of your sale!  

Scholastic Books - If you order $30 online, you get a free book! But feel free to order just one book! Some are as low as $2! Foster a love of reading in your child and they will have the best start into their education!

Summer Program 2020: 

"KINGS, QUEENS, CASTLES & THINGS". 

Registration begins Wednesday, April 15th.  

Sessions run July 6-9, July 13-16, July 20-23 and July 27-30.  Morning sessions 9-12 noon.  

Afternoons sessions 1-4 PM.  

Cost is $110 per session.

IMPORTANT DATES & EVENTS

MAR 6 - 4's Skating Party

MAR 16-20 - Spring Break PRESCHOOL CLOSED

APR 8/9 - Easter Services (3s & 4s)

APR 10 - Good Friday PRESCHOOL CLOSED

APR 13 - Easter Monday PRESCHOOL CLOSED

APR 15 - Summer Program Registration

APR 27-MAY 1 - Jean's Week for Children's Hospital

MAY 18 - Music Open House (3s & 4s)

Hey!! The teachers spend a lot of time planning and preparing to make each day fun and special in the eyes of your child. They want to inspire wonder and curiosity and a love of school and spirit!  

Hurrah for our families! Hurrah for our friends! Hurrah for our community! Hurrah for our school! 

Check out what happened in the classrooms last month:

RAINBOW ROOM - Vibha, Rose, Marjan, Danielle, Arsi

We just had another amazing month of February here in our Rainbow Room.

We were still exploring Winter during the first week of February, we made a beautiful Winter Collage with paint during our Art time. Also, we read our favorite story “Five little Snowmen” during Circle time.

For the second week of February we had with our theme “Valentines”. We learnt all about Love, Friendship, Feelings, Kindness, Sharing& Caring. We also learnt how to say “I love you” in sign language. We had Pajamas day and a Valentine’s Day party. We especially like to thank you to all the parents who bought in all the delicious snacks for our Valentine’s Day party, we had such an amazing time.

For arts, we made a “heart” shape collage with paper, and we did “The Shape of My heart” with paint.

As for circle time we learned “5 Little Valentine’s” (rhyme) and our favorite songs:

“You are my sunshine”

“Skidamarink”

“Way up high in the Valentine tree”

Finally, we finished off the month with our Transportation theme!

We talked about different forms of transportation (Cars, Boats, Trains, Buses, Boats, Planes) We did “This little train” Felt Rhyme.

Our favorite song during circle time was “Wheels on the bus”.

Books we have read are

“Thomas the tank Engine”,

“Trucks”

“That’s not my Truck”

“We all go traveling by”

For arts, we did Tractor painting, Gluing shapes on Yellow bus, transportation shape collage, and hot air balloons painting.

Please continue to have your children walk up and down the stairs by themselves holding the railing and/or your hand, and have them put their own snack bag in the basket. Thank you for your continuous support!

Our themes for March will be Natural Spring and Farm.

As always, please come and talk to us if you have any questions or concerns.

TREEHOUSE ROOM - Karen, Susan, Marjan, Brita, Carol

Hello Parents! We started so many new things this month, here we go.

               Every year we introduce our orca whale Echo to the class. Echo goes home with our children that have registered as a 4. So far 6 children have taken Echo and what adventures he has had so far. Keep the adventures going when it is your child’l,..ls turn.

                On our bulletin boards you should have seen information about the Card Project. The children have put together a beautiful piece of art using watercolour on diffusing paper and an orca whale breaching in the centre. The children were happy with their piece and excited of the possibility of being made into a card. 

                Show and share has been a big hit! We love how the children are happy to show off their items. This is such a wonderful way to get up in front of their peers and be comfortable talking about something they are happy to share. There is a sign up sheet on the Treehouse door, spaces are filling up.

                We have also started our journals. Each week the 4’s will sit down with the teacher and draw something that interests them or something to do with the theme we are focusing on. Once they are finished the children describe their picture to us and we write it down. This will be continued till the end of the year.

                Now on to our themes for the month of February. We started off with BEE KIND. We hope you got a chance to see the board in the hall with all the bee’s 🐝 on it. At circle we read In My Heart and talked about being kind, feelings and sharing. This was a segway into everything about Valentines Day.

                Who doesn’t like chocolate and flowers for Valentines Day. We turned the home corner into a chocolate shop and under the treehouse we made a flower shop. 

                Our circle times were filled with stories The Day it Rained Hearts, Love Splat, Happy Valentines Curious George, Blue heart, blue heart what do you see? We also did 5 little hearts rhyme, Heart is its name, find the missing heart and Valentines give away to you rhyme. 

                For art we where busy making Love bugs from paper plates, decorating paper bags for the Valentine cards, marble painting heart shapes and finger painting the word Love.

                We ended or Valentines Day with a party🎉. Thank you to all the parents that brought food in to share. Without the food it wouldn’t be a party.

                Now on to the second half of the month….

                We went back in time, about 240 million years ago. We transformed the home corner into a Jurassic Park. You could find Volcanoes, T-Rex, Triceratops, Velociraptors, Spinosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, Plateosaurus, Stegosaurus and so many more. There were even Pterodactyls in the sky among the clouds.

                All around the classroom from the water table that had hatching ice eggs, to the sand box that contained dinosaur sand shapers, the light table had plastic bones and brushes. Our tables had dinosaur puzzles, matching games, lace dinosaurs and stencil rubbings.We continued the play out side with a Dinosaur hunt. There were enough for each child to have 1 and they were responsible to find it food, a home and friends. It took our outside play to a whole new level. 

                Dinosaur art was explored with clay, molds, brushes and plastic knives. Painting dinosaur window coverings, using rollers to paint dinosaurs and finger painting the back of a dinosaur and giving it the name of the being of a child…Williamasaurous is an example. We even had dinosaur foot prints leading to the Treehouse. Luckily we were not around to see who left them.

                Circle time was filled with all sorts of information. Were dinosaurs herbivore, carnivore or omnivores? Most carnivores walked on 2 feet that helped them move faster. The word dinosaur means Terrifying lizard. The colour of all dinosaurs in unknown it is just an educated guess. I could go on…….

                We played matching dinosaur game, we read All about Dinosaurs, What if Dinosaurs came back? How do dinosaurs go to school? Dinosaur Stomp, Individual books about particular dinosaurs, The Good Dinosaur CD and watched a video from the Magic School Bus. We also pretend we were dinosaurs using our hands, feet, voices and heads. Last but not least 5 dinosaurs felt rhyme. 

                Whew! I think I covered the month of February. As we head into March we are exploring the world of Dr. Seuss and after Spring break we will be talking about you guessed it, SPRING. Our Easter service will be coming up in April and we are starting to prepare for the Easter service songs, thank you Tiffany.

                Once again thanks for reading our blog to the end. 

SUNFLOWER ROOM - Danielle, Arsi, Carol

For the Month of February, we started with talking about Valentine’s Day. How we love our family and friends. We read the felt story ‘The Lonely Heart’ and books “Froggy’s First Kiss, The night before Valentine’s Day, Franklins Valentine, The biggest Valentine Ever & ‘Skidamarink’.  We also read stories about being kind to one another and helping friends. We guessed which color heart was missing and matched different hearts as a team. We listened to the felt rhymes ‘The Valentine Tree, 6 Valentines & 5 Valentines to Give Away. We sang ‘Skidamarink & the ‘Heart’ Bingo Song. We made Bees with Heart shaped wings, a Heart Collage, a Tree with hearts and made a Heart Shaped Name puzzle.  These art activities involved practicing our cutting skills, hand eye coordination and following 2- 3 steps to complete. A fun time was had in our ‘bakery’ with cookies, cupcakes, cash registers and ‘money’.  We even had fun in the water table finding hearts in the peanut foam (it looked like snow).

We finished Valentine’s Week with a great party. Thank you to the parents who provided the Party food, a fun time was had by all.

We moved onto learning about Numbers, from 1 – 10. We read the Stories “10 Tiny Turtles & 10 Lucky Ladybugs’. We sang “5 Fat Sausages” & “5 Little Elephants”.  We counted out the rhymes 5 Little Frogs and 5 Big Buses.  We found the match to our number from 0 -9 and played which number was missing.  For art we matched the numbers 1 – 10 to make a caterpillar and then used a bingo dabber to count out the amounts needed for each number from 1 -10. In the home corner we turned it into a grocery store where we shopped for things but it had to match the number on the basket. If we had the number 7 on a basket – we could only buy 7 things. This was a great week, as we started to visualize the quantity each number was associated with. e.g. : : = 4.

For our last week we have been busy learning about 4 shapes – Rectangle, Square, Circle and Triangle. We read the books ‘In a box, Scribble, What is a Triangle, Square, Rectangle, Friendshape & Owl Babies’.  For art we matched the different shapes to each other, we cut out a rectangle to make a shape robot and then we used shapes to make our own Owls. We tried something different in the water table as we used different shapes to make our own robots/spaceships. We had the opportunity to ‘throw’ bean bag shapes onto the matching shape in the home corner with our friends.  We have been very busy challenging ourselves while still filling our buckets.

In the next month we will start learning about Spring and our Alphabet. We will also be looking into Kindergarten Readiness.  A big part of this is independence.  As we will be encouraging them to help themselves more as they get ready for kindergarten e.g. putting on their own jackets, zipping up their jackets, opening & closing their own snacks.

MUSIC PROGRAM - Tifany

In the month of February, we celebrated friendship and love. We practiced matching tones and continued to get familiar with the ‘Rhythm Family’. The children were also introduced to the ‘Cousins Three’ and played a fun shoe-passing game to practice our sense of triple or ‘waltz’ time. We must do this because there will be singing and dancing to ‘Waltz’ time in our upcoming Easter Service. During Valentine’s week, we used tone blocks to spell the word, L-O-V-E, in an arpeggio of do-mi-sol-do. (The ‘C’ major scale)

Over the past two weeks we have been talking about our Easter Service and all of the exciting Spring things to look forward to. We coloured to, “Flight of the Bumblebee” and felt the Bzzz of the violin. We marched to the “Anvil Chorus”, learning how to take long legato and short staccato steps and we explored the brass family, as we played our imaginary trumpets to some Big Band music.

We are now into March and focusing all of our energy on preparing for the Easter Service. Our service is going to be full of wonderful surprises, where families will get a chance to enjoy the their children’s developing musicianship.

Families are encouraged to play various genres of music in the home and ask your child if they can hear the beat. See if they can clap or tap with you; maybe even dance! Ask them what instruments they hear and find out why they like/dislike certain songs.

With all my heart, thank you for keeping music in the home. See you in the Spring!

RESOURCE OFFICE - Marion

All the children are busy learning through play.  

The 2s are developing their play skills, sharing and using their words to interact with their peers.  At this age children are wanting some control in their daily routines.  Give them the opportunity to walk down the stairs on their own, holding the railing and they can hang their coats in their cubbies.  Giving young children time to process our requests of them is essential for their development of self help skills.  You can ask a child to repeat your request back to you so you know that they have heard you.  Follow through with expectations and be consistent with consequences. 

The teachers will be working with the 4s on Kindergarten readiness skills.  There are many opportunities each day to point out letters, numbers, colors and shapes.  Play games while driving from one activity to another such as "I Spy", pointing out different objects around them.  Have fun!

 

Summer Program 2020: 

"KINGS, QUEENS, CASTLES & THINGS". 

Registration begins Wednesday, April 15th.  Sessions run July 6-9, July 13-16, July 20-23 and July 27-30.  Morning sessions 9-12 noon.  Afternoons sessions 1-4 PM.  Cost is $110 per session.