A Peek into Preschool 2 ~ Families Unit

Kai started full-day schooling at the international school in August.  Although he missed his fun teachers, friends and days at Gymboree, he has slowly adjusted to his new school and has been good buddies with two boys in his class, an Estonian and a Dutch.  He didn’t have tears on his first day of school and came home with a handprint poem after reading The Kissing Hand.

Families Theme

For the past six weeks, his class has been inquiring into families – what a family is, where the children’s families come from & how the families are the same and different.  Here are some of Kai’s works:

(Top left) Kai's first day of school self-portrait; (top right) Kai's self-portrait drawn in the interactive whiteboard; (bottom left) Painting self-portrait with watercolours; (bottom right) End of unit self-portrait ~ what an improvement from his first day self-portrait!

(Leftmost) Graphing the number of members in the family using paint, googly eyes & confetti; (middle) Family in a house; family members made using popsicle sticks, cloth & yarn; (right) Kai's drawing of his family; (bottom) 3D family puppets using recycled materials

Kai had his "special child day" in early September so that his friends can get to know him better.  He had his Families unit portfolio sharing session at the end of September where he reflected and shared his work with me:

Kai has started the Jolly Phonics program in school where the teacher takes them through one letter sound a week with crafts, stories, games and handwriting.  So far, they have covered /s/, /a/ and /t/.

Celebrations

The five preschool classes had a “Teddy Bear Day” in September where each child brought his/her favourite teddy bear to school.  Unfortunately, Kai’s teacher fell sick that day.  Some classes made teddy bear prints with a real teddy bear, made split pin bears, did patterning with gummy bears and had a teddy bear's picnic!

I celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival with Kai’s class in September.  We read Mooncakes by Loretta Seto, made a craft, ate mooncakes, played the mooncake dice game and even danced around the moon!

Crafts

Now that Kai goes to "big kid" school, I don't do "mommy school" with him anymore.  But every now and then, we'll do some crafts together at home to go along with the theme in school.  These were the crafts we did in August and September:

We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and made a name craft.

5 senses craft ~ the idea came from here

Popsicle stick family craft ~ the idea came from here but I modified it by dressing up the family members with washi tape. Kai drew the faces, hands and feet & labeled each family member.

We read The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree and did a craft to go along with it.