St. Joseph Catholic School

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Mrs. Julie Feely » Home

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Welcome to Little Knights Preschool

 at St. Joseph Catholic School!

“Called to Discipleship: Be Christ’s Light”

 

 

I am excited to be a part of the St. Joseph Catholic School community as the new full day preschool teacher working with four year olds. I look forward to being a part of such a positive and caring academic community where body, mind and spirit are nurtured and developed.
 
Although I earned my education degree in Ohio, I have been a preschool teacher in Libertyville for the last 15 years. I love teaching preschool children and seeing the world through their eyes. I believe a warm and loving environment both encourages children to learn as well as helps them gain self-confidence. I am a strong believer in learning through play as well as hands on learning to help foster a child’s creativity and development. I look forward to a positive, loving, and wonderful year with your child!

 

 

Posts

We heard the story of the King who wanted something new to fall from the sky.  So he asked his royal magicians for help and they create "oobleck", a green substance that rains down.  It is a gooey, gloppy green mess!  We experimented with this substance and it was fun! A quick tap on the surface of oobleck will make it feel hard, because it forces the cornstarch particles together. As you play with it, the oobleck becomes soft and liquid like.  Is it a sold or a liquid or a squalid?
One Fish, two fish, red fish blue fish!  We used our tearing fine motor skills that we learned from Mrs. Goldberg to create our fish.Tearing paper requires strength and endurance of the small muscles in the hand. These intrinsic muscles are important in so many fine motor skills, including handwriting and coloring, managing buttons and zippers and more.
This afternoon we did another Dr. Seuss Write the Room activity.  After we recorded all the new words around the room, we came together and sorted the words by how many syllables were in each word.  A syllable is a word part and all words are made up of syllables. Knowing this will help the children learn how to read and write. Understanding syllables and learning to segment words helps children build skills that  play a vital role in learning to spell, read and pronounce words correctly.
We had our Wednesday visit with Mrs. Goldberg.  Her activity with the children incorporated color, cut and glue 3 step instructions.  Remembering 3 step instructions is a part of working memory and a very important executive functioning skill.  She also observed for posture, pencil/crayon grip, motor planning, visual discrimination, ability to cross the midline, sensory awareness and  proprioceptive awareness.  Proprioception is the internal sense that tells you where your body parts are without your having to look at them. This internal body awareness relies on receptors in your joints, muscles, ligaments, and connective tissue. They pick up information as muscles bend and stretch as well as when your body is still.  The children love having their time with Mrs. Goldberg!
Centers were a lively time today in our room.  At the sensory table we had colored rice, red pom poms, red cups, tweezers and blue metallic shreds!  Lots of giggles were coming from this station!  At the red table, the children did an amazing job recognizing and coloring word family rhymes!  The green table had the children Writing the Room - Dr. Seuss characters.   The class has to move their bodies all around the room to search for the words they need to record. This activity gets the children to practice their writing and handwriting. Write the Room also helps the children focus on beginning letters and sounds. Write the Room is a good way to build your students vocabulary and can be utilized as a assessment.  At the rug, it was non-standard measurement with paper feet.  Each child is measured and they record the amount of feet tall they are.  Afterwards, they measure all kinds of wonderful things around the classroom. With our parent helper it was all about getting ten apples on top of our own self portrait just like in the story of Ten Apples on Top.  
During center time at the art table the children are making their Five Little Valentines retelling craftivity.  Have your child share this adorable poem with you!!
Anna and McKenna had on unicorn shirts with their wacky outfits. The Cat in the Hat colored Legos have been very engaging this week too!  The children did such a great job with the Cat in the Hat memory game that we made it more challenging by adding more picture pairs to find!
We loved reading Wacky Wednesday and finding all the wacky things in the pictures.  The children had fun coming up with their own ideas of what would be wacky!
It was Wacky Wednesday in Preschool!  We had so many wacky outfits today - a Cat in the Hat, backwards clothing, silly headbands and mismatched shoes!  How wacky!