Here’s what a day in Share and Care looks like for our friends!
8:55-9:15 – Arrival Activities – As Mrs. Hoffman is getting kiddos out of cars, Mrs. Weber is the gatekeeper to our hallway. Kiddos find their hooks to hang up their backpacks and coats, grab their folders and sanitize their hands before heading into the classroom. Once inside we have a planned activity for them that Mrs. Gott supervises in our classrooms. These activities include working in our fine motor journals, morning boxes and table activities.
9:15-9:30 – Classroom Community – During this time we assign our classroom community jobs and allow everyone to check into learning for the day. Our greeter welcomes each child and teacher, giving everyone an option of preferred greeting. Choices include heart hands, hug, dance, spirit fingers and many more. During that time, Mrs. Hoffman is calling friends to the front of the classroom to use their feeling “spot” to indicate how they are feeling that day. Our feeling choices are happy, sad, scared, angry and excited. Throughout the class day we draw our name sticks so that friends have the opportunity to come to the front of the class to share why they are feeling that way. Our weather helper checks out the weather, records it on our graph and reports it to our class. Our light helper and line leader fulfill their roles throughout our class time and our flag holder holds our American flag for the Pledge of Allegiance. Our song leader gets to choose the song of the day. Some of our favorites include “Make a Pizza” and “Waiting for the Elevator.”
9:30-9:50 – Literacy Block – This is our time to read our “Weekly Read.” We will be starting our 2023-2024 school year with “My Wild First Day of School.” We also get to work on specific literacy skills like print concepts, retelling stories or sequencing events. During this time we introduce that week’s wonderful word. Our first wonderful word will be “wild.” Each wonderful word has a child centered definition AND a hand gesture that goes with it. In September we will also be working on hearing rhyming words.
9:50-10:00 – Bathroom Break – This is the time where each of our friends have the opportunity to use the bathroom and wash their hands before snack. This is also our time to practice walking in lines and waiting patiently for our friends to finish their jobs. We also utilize this hallway waiting time to work on different literacy and math skills. We will start our year by counting our friends in different ways. This type of counting has us assigning one number to each friend we count and falls under our math goal of “1 to 1 Correspondence.”
10:00-10:15 – Snack Time – Our friends enjoy snack time with their peers and get to practice participating in peer conversations and perhaps trying some new foods. Each month we have a new locally available food for us to try. Our September food will be raspberries. At the end of snack, we wash our hands and rejoin our other classroom friends on the rug.
10:15-10:30 – Whole Group Learning – This block is for our math, science, social studies and creative art exploration. We start this time with another “Feeling Check-In” for a few of our friends before working on a specific skill OR introducing a new idea. We will be starting our school year talking about butterflies and watching some painted lady caterpillars go through the process of metamorphosis. We will learn the butterfly life cycle and some pretty big vocabulary words like chrysalis.
10:30-11:15 – Free Choice Center Play – This block of time is where our kiddos get to choose their learning path. Our centers rotate throughout the month to ensure new (yet familiar) experiences in our block center, dramatic play center, art center, discovery center, library or with our toys and games. This is also the time where our teachers may call out our learners to work one-on-one on specific skills or in small groups.
11:15-11:25 – Clean Up and Read Aloud – After our rooms are reset for learning the next day, each room has a quiet read aloud time. Our ladybugs get to hear an additional weekly read. They will be starting with a non-fiction book about wild animals. Our honeybees will be starting with “The Wild Robot,” a chapter book that encourages our readers to create mental pictures and keep track of the storyline and characters from reading to reading.
11:25-11:45 – Outdoor Classroom Time – On nice days we spend time outside moving our big muscles. We have opportunities to climb and balance, kick, throw and catch balls, hula hoop, make music, build or play in out outdoor playhouse. We enjoy keeping track of the wildlife as well and take turns filling up the bird feeders. We have a garden that we watch develop and a living teepee with climbing plants. If the weather is not outdoor appropriate for our time, we move our big muscles indoors doing yoga, dancing, playing with bean bags or completing an indoor obstacle course.
11:45-11:55 – Bible Story & Praise Music – The end of our day is for learning just how much we are loved. Each week we work on two praise songs. We also read stories out of the Beginner’s Bible AND watch the same stories in short Bible videos. We will start the year learning about how God created the universe. We pray at the end of our time before singing our “Good-bye” song.
11:55 – 12:00 – Dismissal At the end of the day, we grab our belongings that our teachers have organized for us, and head to the hallways to await the call of our name indicating that our ride is ready.
We know the value of each minute in our preschool day and work our hardest to ensure that we are helping to develop the whole child during their mornings at Share and Care.