Dear Families,

It was a pleasure sitting down with you and discussing your child’s preschool progress at conferences. I appreciate you finding the time to review how your little ones are doing and what skills we will be working on next as the school year continues. 

Preschoolers had a fantastic week as we ended our Ball unit with a memorable field trip to the Children’s Museum this Wednesday. I am deeply grateful for your partnership throughout the unit and your generous support in donating or lending us balls and providing us with a new building set, books, grid, and various ducts so children could build and test out a ramp!

Next week, our class is beginning to study trees. We will observe and compare trees to learn about what lives in them, what they are made from, and who cares for them. We hope that this study will help children explore and appreciate nature. As we study trees, we will use language and literacy, math, the arts, and technology to explore the topic in depth. We will learn important social studies and scientific concepts through firsthand investigations. 

We would appreciate your help in collecting tree parts to investigate. We would welcome your support and would love it if you could take a “tree talk” with your child and collect fallen things, such as leaves, bark, acorns, twigs, flowers, fruit, or cones. Some of the things we are looking for include: 

• Small, exciting limbs, branches
• Food from trees (fruit)
• Pinecones
• A live, potted tree (such as a palm, a rosemary tree, a bonsai, etc.) children can care for (we already have a watering can! :)) 
• Clippings 
• Seeds
• Sections of trees
• Tree bark 

We also ask that you take a picture of your child in front of their favorite tree and bring in a leaf, a small branch, or a bark rubbing of the tree with their picture on Monday, October 21st. 

We’ve been eyeing several items we could use in our classroom for trees and to set up our dramatic play area around the world of camping (tied to our new Trees unit). Some of our little friends have been playing “campsite” for a few days – imagine their joy when we transform a classroom into a campground! We welcome your ideas and both new and gently used donations.  You can see our wish list on Amazon. 

It’s October, and students can’t wait for our Halloween celebration! You can view our Sign Up Genius here. 

Finally, our class needs more wet wipes. We primarily use wet wipes to clean little hands after lunch in the cafeteria. Please consider donating some wet wipes if you can. 

Enjoy the long fall weekend together!

Warmly,

Annie