Friday, January 15, 2010

Parents Day at SJID

Today was Parent's Day at Abby's school. When I first got the information, I misunderstood and thought it was only during breakfast time. I found out a few days later it was an entire day event where parents could go to the school and meet with other parents, observe the kids day, eat lunch with their child, and then attend some informational seminars in the afternoon. Well, since I only found out it was an all day event at the last minute I wasn't able to take the day off. So I attended from 8am to 10:00am this morning.

I am just amazed at how structured the little 3/4 year old preschool class is. They are so cute, and know their routine so well. When they first get to school, Abby's teacher does hearing checks. She has each child take a turn and go stand by "Brooke" (Brooke is a lifesize doll that they use for a lot of activities in the classroom). The teacher then goes thru the Ling sound drills (oo, ee, a, m, sh, s and other sounds). As she says each sound, the child repeats. She takes a long pause before one sound for each of the kids and when they hear the pause they say "nothing". It was very cute. Brooke is about 10 feet away from the teacher. It was exciting for me to see Abby hear each and every sound from 10 feet away (even s and sh)!!

The next thing they do is circle time where they sing a little song about each child who is at school and they do their calendar time with day of the week, Month, and date. Abby is really doing well with counting and counts to 20 pretty consistently.

After circle time they have an event each day. I'm not sure what each of the daily events are, but today was story time. Abby's teacher has several books sitting out, all related to winter and cold weather. The kids picked out a story and Gina read it, pausing for them to fill in blanks (they've heard these stories a few times). Then, they go to the table for another event (today was show and tell).

Long story short, after 2 hours of sitting activities, they finally get to go and play. Their playtime is also structured by having certain things set out for play. This month they are learning all the language around winter. So they are learning words like snow, scarf, mittens, earmuffs, etc.

Abby was very proud to have her mom there today. She was acting a little shy because I was there, but for the most part she did really well. She is such a hard little worker and now I better understand why she is SO tired in the evenings and on weekends!

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