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Welcome to Preschool at St. Joseph Catholic School!

I am so excited to be your child’s preschool teacher this year!

This is my sixth year at St. Joseph Catholic School and I am looking

forward to helping your child grow, and learn,

and have fun this year.

I have been a preschool teacher in Libertyville for over 25 years,

and am passionate about helping young children learn.

I believe children learn best with hands-on experiences and

help facilitate their many different learning styles

in a kind and nurturing setting.

We will have an amazing year together meeting new friends, sharing new

discoveries, and learning new skills everyday.

Our instructional aide, Mrs. Tina Truskowski, has much experience in the classroom

after being a aide at St. Joseph Catholic School for over 15 years!

Together, we help build positive relationships with children to help foster

growth and confidence in a caring classroom community.

We are both looking forward to sharing a wonderful year with your child.

*Please remember to subscribe to my website for updates including fun photos

and videos of our classroom!!

Welcome to Our Bunch!

Posts

No snow outside didn’t stop us from making our snowman today! Preschoolers identified the steps of building a Snowman! They gave verbal directions using ordinal numbers to sequence each step! Many agreed our snowman resembled the one in our story, The Biggest, Best Snowman. Preschoolers then went to the tables to complete own Sequencing Snowman using 5 steps! ☃️

A PreK 4 favorite! Marching Around the Alphabet gives us practice with rapid letter naming! Today, we stepped it up a bit by adding letter sound skills! So fun combining music & movement with phonemic awareness! This combination is a also a great way to connect with the many learning styles of young children!

Peek at Our Week January 9 - January 13, 2023

PreK 3

Religion - Unit 3: God Made Me Happy - “I Can Celebrate”. We celebrate good things from God. The celebration in this unit will prepare children for liturgical celebrations and also give them an appreciation of an aspect of creation: the color green, which stands for life.

Social Studies - Winter and Us! How do things change in the winter season? What clothes do we need for winter? Preschoolers will brainstorm cold weather activities, and identify their favorite.

Math - Spatial awareness: recognizing spatial relationships among people and objects. Winter sort/graph: mittens or gloves.

Language/Literacy - Building letter knowledge through review of letters Aa - Ll. Raising letter print awareness through games and activities both in large/small group. Letter Focus of the Week: Mm.

PreK 4

Religion - Special Lesson: God Made Me Unique. Children will realize that God creates each of us special. They will appreciate all our wonderful characteristics that make each of us different. They will praise God for the special characteristics that make them wonderful and unique.

Literacy - OWL - Unit 3 - Week 4: All Kinds of Communities - “What kinds of communities do people live in?” Alphabet Knowledge: match letters, Phonological awareness: identify rhyming and non-rhyming word pairs, letter sounds A-M Writing: dictate a story. Concept words: country, farm, neighbor, people, town. Amazing words: bloom, garden, stem, breeze, sprinkle, vine, Blend onset and rime. Categorize words. Identify ending punctuation. Answer questions about a book. Retell a story. Narrate a story. Sequencing steps to build a snowman. Identify similar/different beginning sounds. Sequence 4 step. Delete syllable from words. Letter Focus of the Week: Mm.

Math - Geometry: Name and describe attributes of common solid shapes: cone, cube, sphere. Identify and combine solid shapes to create new ones. Create common three-dimensional shapes. Demonstrate that the order of counting sequence is always the same. Extending patterns. Graphing 2-D flat shapes. Sorting by size.

Specials - Music with Mr. Showstead, Media with Mrs. Hoglund

Directed Drawing with Mr. Grubb - M is for Mickey Mouse. We welcome Sasha’s Dad to Preschool! Mr. Grubb will guide us through this step-by-step approach of drawing Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Preschoolers will listen carefully to descriptive language and follow directions. We can’t wait!!!

Preschool+Plus

Book Club - “The Mitten” vs. “The Hat”, by author Jan Brett. Preschoolers will be involved in comparing/contrasting these two winter selections. They will use graphic organizers to compare characters of each book. The children will sequence characters and events to help them retell the story.