Music & Movement: Count of 5! Great job understanding positional words today as we placed different parts of our body inside/outside our circles! Elbows, Head, Foot, Hands, and Shoulder! Which was the trickiest?
Home
Welcome to Preschool at St. Joseph Catholic School!
I am so excited to be your child’s preschool teacher this year!
This is my ninth 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
Super Circle Tracing! Morning Work gives us experience with following directions, sequencing steps, whole group learning, and trying our best! Coloring with crayons helps develop our fine motor strength, dexterity, and grasp! All skills we need to write and form letters!
STEM: “How many drops fit on your dot?” Preschoolers learned how to use another scientific tool today, pipettes! The children discovered how to use just the right amount of pressure to squeeze just one drop at a time! Too much and the water will squirt all over! This required lots of fine motor control and concentration! They enjoyed having lots of practice with this one!
We discovered an amazing property of water was the way it could hold together to form a dome-like shape over our rocks! Addison discovered she could fit 5 more drops of water on her dot because of this attribute! Science rocks!
Preschool+Plus read Me on the Map, by Joan Sweeney! Our story helped us understand the concept of maps and how they are used to show us where things are!
We used Google Maps to give the preschoolers a ‘bird’s eye view’ of their school and other familiar places! This helped to give them the viewpoint they would need to map their own classroom!
Mapping our Classroom! We related physical locations in our rooms, and pointed to where they might represent them in our map! They identified what shape or color they would use to represent certain objects, such as the toy shelf or our big blue rug! Preschoolers then worked in teams to make models of these objects using construction paper, scissors, and markers!
Our Class Map! Complete with rugs, windows, Art and Listening Centers! Even the flowers on Mrs. Truskowski’s blue table! Zoom in to some of the details preschoolers added to make it look like our own!
Literacy Circle: My ABC Book of Friends introduced our class to alliteration, which is important for developing letter/sound relationships! We enjoyed creating a word that begins with the first letter of our name to complete the prompt! For example:
Blaise loves babies.
Harper loves hugs.
Harper loves hugs.
Declan loves dinosaurs.
Mackenzie loves mice.
Emerson loves eggs.
Sam loves snakes.
Our names help us learn about letters in a meaningful and relevant way! We learned that big letters are also called capital letters and little letters are lowercase letters! The children are learning to differentiate the difference between “numbers” and “letters”! We added mosaic tiles to the first
letter in our names (sneaking in some fine motor that promoted used other pincer grip!) These look so pretty hanging in our classroom!
Coconut Science🌴🥥 Preschoolers used the scientific method to investigate a coconut today! They used language to express how it looked, felt, and even sounded! They learned that our coconut was kept in a ziploc bag to keep our room nut-free! A coconut is a tree nut!
Scientists use their 5 senses! We recorded our observations about how our coconut looks, feels, and sounds! “Do you think it will sink or float?”
“What di3 the inside of a coconut look like?” The children made predictions about what the inside would look like! Many were surprised by the white, hollow center! They enjoyed hearing how our coconut needed many whacks by a hammer to finally crack open! They also examined the liquid they heard sloshing around inside the nut, coconut water!
Media with Mrs. Hoglund! We read another super one from author, P D Eastman (a good friend of Dr. Seuss!) Together Dr Seuss and Eastman created Early Readers which, today, are still awesome for our beginning readers! Are You My Mother? was a fun one!
We used Storytime Online to make our own listening choice! Loved all their varied selections!
