A few of you have asked about our lunch menu, I am attaching it to this email here–>Sept Lunch Menu

You can also view the menu on the bulletin board outside our classroom door.

Children in our classroom eat “family style.”  The cafeteria prepares a main dish, a fruit, vegetable and milk each day for lunch.  Children are encouraged to serve themselves and pass dishes around the table.  During lunch children socialize, build relationships with peers and teachers while sharing in a meal together.  Some children are introduced to vegetables/fruits/main dishes that they’ve never tried before.  Teachers eat with the kids and encourage them to take “try it” bites to see if they like the new food.  While some children prefer not to eat the broccoli or items offered, they have other choices to choose from.  Most of our main dishes include a bread and a cheese (a good majority of our kids eat these things).  While children are adjusting to eating away from home, please encourage them to try new things with us at school.  So far we are noticing a good majority of the kids trying foods and eating with us.  We are very excited about this!

Part of the requirements of our PreK programming include providing all children with a school lunch.  Please give your child time to adjust to the classroom surroundings- while we cannot create specific menus for each individual children, we are learning which foods the majority of our kids will eat.  If we notice something that is not halel or is not eaten by the kids that is on our menu, we will choose a second option for all kids to enjoy.

If you are worried about your child not eating enough (only 1 child in our room, we are concerned about) feel free to give them breakfast before school and have a snack ready for them to eat after school.

Weekly Reminders:

• Monday, September 17th is our first full day of Preschool.
• Please be sure to arrive early to get a parking spot especially at pick up time.  Children will be released from school at 3:20, but you should be in the parking lot no later than 3:05 to get a parking spot.  We will make sure students are ready promptly so that you can exit the parking lot quickly so another family may use the parking spot.
• Wednesday, September 26th we will have dentist visit our school to check our students.  The service is FREE of charge to all students in our program.  I will be sending home permissions slips that you will need to sign so your child can participate.

 Weekly Lessons:

• Lesson Plans for this week can be found here –>Sept17
  • We will be focusing on adjusting to our full day routine, learning the names of our classmates, practicing how to greet someone and exploring our classroom environment.

I wanted to give you a little bit about our first day…..as I am sure the only thing you got from your child was “I played.”  I thought a little explanation of the day may help you get some more details from your child.

Once children were settled, our day began with a small breakfast.  Kids ate graham crackers and drank milk-most kids can even open their milk by themselves 🙂  Children learned how to clean up their breakfast space and how to dispose of garbage, wrappers and left over milk.  After breakfast, children talked about the items on the message board.

Today’s messages showed children that we would be watching our froggy go from activity to activity to see what we will be doing at school (see picture of our daily schedule and froggy).  After children learned about our toy bins, and how to put toys back in the right spot, children made plans of where they wanted to begin their work.

         

 

In PreK, we use “work time” as the time of day when children can explore our classroom and use toys in ways meaningful to them.  After work time, children heard the bell (that tells kids when it’s almost time to clean up).  Below are pictures of children during work time.  Show them to your child-it might help them remember a little more about their first day.

 

 

 

Children cleaned up their toys and gathered together at the carpet for recall time.  Recall is the time of day when we talk about where we worked during work time and what we did.  We were excited to hear children using the areas of our room (example: “I worked in the house area” or “block area) to talk about their work time experiences.

We read a story together called Mouse Goes to School.  We pretended to fall asleep and wake up and get ready for school.

Overall, a good start to our year together!