Drumming with Ms. Lori

This week in Room 10, the Little Eagles have been reading the fairy tale "The Three Little Pigs." Storytime is accompanied by activities to build listening and comprehension skills. The preschoolers built their own straw, stick, or brick house and pretended to be the Big Bad Wolf to see if they could blow their house down. Students also used straws to "huff and puff" the paint (blowing through a straw) to move their paint around on the paper. Listening to and comprehending spoken and written words are essential aspects of learning, and students demonstrated their ability to pick up individual story elements, such as a character and interactions among characters as well as the sequence between events.

At Monday's Board of Education Meeting, Director Heidi Schmidt shared an update on the progress towards Strategic Plan goals at FECC along with fun and exciting things on the horizon, such as the Young Athletes Special Olympics program in partnership with Life Lab of Ferndale. One point she focused on was the importance of novelty in an early childhood classroom to capture attention, create interest and activate essential learning behavior. FECC has created an ever growing Materials Lending Library to support teachers in being able to routinely provide new and engaging experiences within their classrooms. Staff are able to request any of the items to borrow for use in their classrooms as a way to enhance, extend, and challenge student thinking.

Mrs. Schmidt was joined by Ms. Shelby Martin, Lead Teacher in a tuition-based classroom, who shared how she accesses the lending library often to increase student engagement and learning. Prior to inviting members of the Board to play with her and a few of her students' new classroom toy, she shared what STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) looks like in a preschool classroom. All in a day's play, students at FECC are involved in data analysis, experimenting, predicting, drawing conclusions, counting, measurement and problem solving. One of the most novel items in Ms. Shelby's class is Air Toobz (https://shorturl.at/pNVWZ).

Members of the Board got a front row seat to observe and participate in the STEM learning that items like this provide in the early childhood classroom. In these ten minutes alone, the students were seen experimenting, problem-solving, working together, making predictions, using spatial reasoning, making comparisons and most importantly, having fun while learning through play.

Lower Special Ed team being "Creepy Pair of Underwear" for Book Character Day!! You can enjoy a read-along of this popular Aaron Williams children's book on YouTube. The kids thought it was silly to see their teachers wearing underwear.

The rainy weather didn’t stop the fun at FECC’s annual Trunk or Treat! Families were invited inside to trick or treat the hallways and staff decorated their station instead of their trunk. Trunk or Treat is always a favorite school family event and even though it looked different this year, the turnout was huge!

This week, Little Eagles Preschool read the story Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom is a story about the alphabet letters climbing a coconut tree. The lower-case letters climb up the tree, but the tree bends and the letters fall out. Then Uppercase letters (the older relatives) help the lower-case letters back up into the tree. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom is an excellent story that introduces preschoolers to uppercase and lowercase letters of the alphabet. We talked about how letters are used to spell words like our names.

After listening to the story we made our very own Chicka Chicka Boom Boom letters using the first letter of their names. Our friends had a blast decorating the first letter of their names with colorful collage materials like shapes, stickers, sequences, and stickers. Abigail said, "My name starts with the letter A for apple and astronaut.” Remy said, “ My name starts with the letter R for Remy and Robot.”