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Welcome to the Red Apples Four Day PM Class

email: redapples@theacornschool.net

Red Apple News                                                                               

August 17-28, 2020

School has started and we are all so very excited! Our little Red Apple class is full with 6 students, and they have already begun to make friends.  I would like to introduce your child’s floating afternoon teachers, Blanca Rivas and Adriana Mora-Pena. This is Blanca’s second year at The Acorn.  She was a Honeybee and Ladybug teacher last year and is also a Blue Star Teacher.  She holds a Child Development Associate (CDA) certification for teaching young children.  Before coming to the Acorn, she had eight prior years’ experience teaching children from 3 to 14 years of age.  Blanca has a kind and sensitive way with children and her cheerfulness is infectious!  Blanca has been married for 20 years and has a 16-year-old daughter, Victoria.  Her daughter attends Incarnate Word High School and will be a junior this year.  In her spare time, Blanca loves to travel, participate in Zumba and loves spending time with her family.  This is Adriana’s first year at the Acorn. She started her time with us as a teacher in our summer camp.  She previously worked as a teacher in the Mexican American Unity Council’s after school program and an ESL teacher.  She also has worked as a sales associate and greeter and her warm, sensitive nature draw children to her. She is fluent in Spanish and plays violin and is also helping with our Caterpillar, Hummingbird, and Little Lamb Classes. We are very lucky to have them as a wonderful addition to the Red Apples team!

The general theme for the first two weeks is “Getting to Know You” and our play theme is “Housekeeping.” We have a small kitchen set up in Dramatic Play with dishes, toy food and utensils.

During our first week, we read stories like “Froggy Goes to School” and “Rocking in My School Shoes.”  We played a ball game to learn each other’s names and we danced to the music of Miss Terri’s favorite “Freeze Dance” song. We played Color Bingo and share pets in our home as an introduction to graphs. For art, we colored pictures to put on our bulletin board, molded and cut shapes with Playdoh and decorated small cardboard easels.  We took a special guided tour of the inside and outside of the school, learning boundaries and where can and cannot go without a teacher.

Our second week of school will be packed with fun things to play and learn.  We will read stories like,’ Time for School,” “The Way I Feel,” “Today I Feel Silly,” and “Clap Your Hands.”  In large group, we will learn the parts of the calendar as an introduction to this daily activity. For art, we will make “Apple Prints” with apples cut in half, paint on easels, use rolling pins to flatten our Playdoh and we will make colorful bead necklaces. We will set up our Sensory Table with soapy water and dishes. We will sing songs every day that help us with our gross and fine motor skills: “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” “Itsy, Bitsy Spider,” “B I N G O” and “The Chicken Dance.”  In small groups, we plan to do two science experiments. We will learn how apple seeds “pop” up in the bubbles of club soda and what makes things sink or float.  We will wrap rubber bands around small plastic animals and then carefully remove them, again, working on our fine motor skills. Finally, name cards will be introduced and we will begin our daily letter, number, shape, and color review as we learn how to spell our names.

Tips to make these first few weeks a bit easier for you and your little Red Apple: Don’t rush through the morning.  Arrive a little early, put on a happy face, and hang around a bit to watch from a distance.  Keep good-byes short and, on the way home, ask your child about his/her day.  They will love to share what they did at school.

This is a sweet class. We’re going to have lots of fun together this year.

Miss Terri