Parent-Child Activity Day

November 2, 2009

Dear Families,

This Thursday, November 5th is our first Parent-Child Activity day of the school year. We are very excited and are looking forward to spending this time dedicated to working with you and your child. We wanted to share our plan with you to ensure that everyone is prepared for a wonderful experience.
For the past several weeks we have been studying the image of the child. Some of the activities we have completed are: using hand mirrors to study our faces and draw ourselves, discussing our summer bags to learn more about one another and the types of things we like to do, finding out our whole name and the story behind it from our Moms and Dads, and learning about the letters that are in our names. Learning about the letters in our name has turned into a study of letters in our environment.
Through nature walks and delivering our flyers for our Halloween food collection the children have discovered letters of the alphabet wherever we go. The trees around Barbara Vick have given us V’s, W’s and X’s, railings on porches produce a G or an S, and wheels on cars or the tops of a fire hydrant give us the letter O. They have become so adept at finding letters that we have created a “natural alphabet” in our classroom for the children to use when spelling their names or other words. We will be using our “natural alphabet” as part of our Parent-Child Activity.
Our activity on Thursday will be to create family books that will be kept in our classroom for the remainder of the school year. The children LOVE to look at themselves and their families in any books that we have made in the past. In addition it is a great way for the children to learn about each other’s families.
Each family is asked to bring no more than 10 family photos no larger than 4x6 to put in their book. Please keep in mind that these books will not be returned until the end of the year so you might want to make copies of the photos. Also, we will do our best to make sure that no harm comes to the books while they are in our care but we know that they will be well-loved by the time they are sent home.
We will be using our natural alphabet to spell out each family’s name as the covers for all the books. If you care to bring in any stickers, mementos or other type of embellishment for inside your book please feel free to do so; otherwise all supplies will be provided in the classroom. We will have some alphabet stickers, paper cutters, die-cut shapes, decorative punches, journaling pens, etc. for your use.
Please remember that this one hour activity time is dedicated for you and your Barbara Vick child only. This hour counts as your child’s attendance for the day. Ask your child to help with the selection of the photos so that they are aware of what you will be working on together. We will be talking about this special day in class as well. We are looking forward to seeing all of our beautiful 107 family books! Any questions/comments/concerns please ask in class or email us at vickroom107@ameritech.net

Ms. Amy, Ms. Mary, Ms. Joanne & Ms. Pam