Tiskets N Taskets- November 2021

Dear Parents, We have so much to be grateful for this season and the Lord continues to be faithful through it all. I am so thankful to be surrounded by amazing families, teachers, parents, and children. The teachers and staff are incredible and I am blessed to have an amazing team who work hard and are so dedicated to their craft. Our Faith community is remarkable and I appreciate each and every one of you! As we enter this season of thankfulness and gratitude, with warm feelings yet also hard times, it is important that we help our children with their emotions. Emotional regulation (or self-regulation) is the ability to monitor and adjust emotions with how you experience and express them. Emotional regulation is not a skill we are born with and young children’s emotions can vary from day to day, minute by minute. It is our job as parents to help our children learn how to self-regulate. Your child’s ability to work through their emotions affects family, friends, their mental health, and ability to thrive in this world. Laying these foundations in the early years of life will equip them with skills for years to come. Although temperament and genetics can play a part in a child’s ability to self-regulate, all children can learn to manage their feelings if they are given an appropriate environment. So how can we help as parents? We can…

Model emotion regulating skills
Adopt a warm and responsive parenting style
Foster a positive emotional climate with the family in the home
Notice, accept, empathize with and validate your child’s feelings (positive and negative)
Verbalize how they/we feel and encourage them to problem-solve.

It’s important to know that to self-regulate doesn’t always mean decreasing or ignoring negative feelings like sadness or anger. If we suppress negative feelings and force our children not to express them we are not teaching them self-regulation. Talking about emotions, accepting and responding to your child’s emotional needs, and showing empathy can help validate your child’s negative feelings and help them through the process.

None of us can provide the perfect home or model self-regulation skills correctly all of the time. We are parents (and human) and expecting perfection can actually increase tension and stress. Please show yourself some grace, take a deep breath, and know that you are loved by God who cares for you and your child. If you ever want to talk more about self-regulation, need help, or want to pray, please stop by my office. My door is always open.

Thank you again for your love and support. I am overwhelmed with gratitude and appreciation for each and every one of you! YOU make Faith Preschool a great place to be! With love, Allison Lee School Director

Thank you for “Going Pink” during October for Breast Cancer Awareness Month! Your support was tremendous. This month we have an opportunity to support our Preschool with our Lucky Goat Coffee Fundraiser starting November 8th. It’s an easy gift you can check off your list for family, friends, coworkers, or your neighbors to show gratitude just in time for the Christmas holiday.

Classroom News

Mrs. Phillips and Mrs. Roberts Two Year Olds

Happy Fall! Now that everyone is winding down from the Halloween frenzy, we are able to enjoy the changing weather and approaching Holiday season. Thank you to the parents who helped make our Halloween parties a huge success! This month we will be learning about Fall and Thanksgiving. We have already started talking about the changing leaves and crisp, cool weather. We are focusing on red, yellow, and brown. The children made beautiful fall leaves that are hanging on our classroom windows.

November is also a great month to discuss sharing and making friends. We will be learning about the first Thanksgiving and what it means to be thankful. In the three short weeks before Thanksgiving, we will be making t-shirts, headbands, and placemats for our ‘Feast” with Ms. Fen’s class on Wednesday November 17th.

We are, of course, singing lots of fun songs about turkeys!

Mrs. Roberts and I are excited about autumn and the life it brings to the classroom. We are truly thankful for each of your wonderful children!

Ms. Fenstermaker and Ms. Baker Two Year Olds

Happy November and happy fall! This cool weather is such a nice way to start out the new month!

During October we had a fun time learning all about the farm and Halloween. Our farm animals were a big hit with the class as well as singing old Macdonald with our puppets. In the second half of the month our room took a spooky turn as we added hand painted ghosts, finger print spiders, and foam jack-o-lanterns. A big thank you to our moms, Rachel, Leigha, and Vanessa for providing us our goodies so we could celebrate with an exciting snack! The kids looked so cute in their costumes!

As we move onto November we now look forward to learning about fall and Thanksgiving! This year we’ll be having a special feast with our two’s class next door!

Dates to remember:

- No school on November 11th for Veterans Day

- Thanksgiving Feast November 17th

- Thanksgiving Break November 22nd-26th

Mrs. Larkin and Ms. Fannin Three Year Olds

This month we will be learning about Native Americans, Pilgrims, the first Thanksgiving and focusing on the joy of being thankful for all our blessings. We have so much to be thankful for each and every day with your sweet children!

As we move through this month we will also be focusing on the colors yellow (amarillo) & brown (cafe), the number 4 (cuatro), the shape square and discovering of sinking and floating properties in science. The children always enjoy our science fun.

We would like to give a special thanks to our October volunteers: Christin Soni for being our October reading buddy, the Lumpkin family and Keshia Jenkins for their generous donations and Laura McHargue for making our Halloween party extra special!

Also, we are especially thankful and would like to welcome the Kiker family, as their son Konrad joined our class.

We will end our month with a Thanksgiving feast and the children will be singing a special song that we will video and send to all our faith families, so be on the lookout for a little turkey fun. Gobble…Gobble…

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Mrs. Marsh and Mrs. Rowan Three Year Olds

During the month of October our class focused on everything Fall! We took a week each studying leaves, scarecrows, pumpkins, and Halloween. Some of our favorite books were “The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything,” “Leaf Man” and “The Itsy-Bitsy Pumpkin.” We all had fun singing and dancing to “The Five Little Pumpkins,” “Scarecrow, Scarecrow” and “Autumn Leaves are Falling.” We all got messy stamping with squash, painting ghosts with cotton balls and making pumpkin collages. Thank you so much to the parents who made our special snacks (Oreo spiders and pumpkin pies), parties and field trips possible! The pumpkin patch and costume parade were so much fun!

November will be a time for giving thanks. We are beginning with a unit on community helpers – being thankful for all the ways they help us every day. We have turned parts of the classroom into a grocery store, doctors and veterinarian’s offices and post office. In this month we will also be studying harvests and the Thanksgiving holiday. The school will be having a Lucky Goat Coffee Fundraiser running from 11/8 – 11/19 and we will be collecting Thanksgiving canned goods through 11/14. We appreciate all your support for us, your children, and the school. We are thankful for the opportunity to teach them daily.

Mrs. Bearss and Mrs. Jacobs Four Year olds

Hello! Our Costume Parade and Halloween Pumpkin Party were so much fun and a wonderful way to end the month of October!

On Monday, Nov 1, we talked a little bit about Dia De Los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. Your children may already be a little familiar with this celebration from the movie Coco. In the United States, many families celebrate this as All Souls Day. The day is not about being sad, but about celebrating family and friends we have lost. We read several fun books, made paper Marigolds, and colored our own Calaveras (sugar skulls) masks. Then we had a small parade while playing the song “Remember Me.” We also prayed to God and thanked him for our families. It was a sweet and simple way to experience this piece of a culture different than our own!

We begin our We Give Thanks unit this month! This starts with a week all about Kindness (which coincides with our Letter Kk week!) Mrs. Jacobs and I have spent the first three months calling out super star friends who we see showing kindness, but now it's your children's turn! We are encouraging them to call out friends who they see being kind! They will be able to help us send home Super Star notes and we will also be earning pom poms for every kindness that the children notice and point out. When we fill our kindness jar, we will get a class reward. :) You'll see more about this new incentive in the coming weeks.

After K week we will have the letter R and the letter U. These will correspond with Respect and Understanding! All together we are working to build love and acceptance and community in our class. These are the true gifts from God that we are thankful for! At Thanksgiving, we focus on giving thanks to God for all of these blessings! Amen!

Mrs. Cherry and Mrs. Poucher Four Year Olds

November is here and it finally feels like Fall. October was a very busy month as we celebrated 3 birthdays, carved pumpkins, visited the Pumpkin Patch, had a cooking day, a costume parade and our Fall Party.

Thank you to The Harrison Family for donating the cooking supplies and to The Sutton and Scott Families for providing our yummy Fall Party snacks. We have traded our Orange/Black decorations for RED, WHITE and BLUE as we learn about the USA, our Community Helpers and just how thankful we are for God’s creation all around us.

We will celebrate our Veterans by wearing Red, White and Blue on Friday Nov. 12th and have a Friendsgiving Feast at school on Thursday Nov 18th. In this time of giving thanks, we are so very thankful for your children and the amazing families that they represent.

Mrs. Roberts and Ms. Arthur Four Year Olds

Happy Fall! We are really enjoying this beautiful fall weather. October was so much fun with a wonderful trip down to the pumpkin patch. We really enjoyed exploring and looking at all of the amazing pumpkins and gourds.

Many thanks to the Branham and Jarrard families for contributing to our Halloween festive snack. A huge thank you to Chandler Evans (Wyatt) and the Tallahassee Fire Department for coming to visit and letting us see their fire truck up close! The children were able to check out the inside and see all of the special equipment they use. It was an exciting day! Another big thank you to Dr. Jarrard (Henry). He sent in surgical masks and hats for everyone in our class. Henry did a fantastic job showing us photos and explaining about a special robot that his dad uses during surgery.

November brings us to our units about the Solar System and We are Thankful. We will also continue our weekly letter study with H, I, and J. We are very thankful to be able to spend each morning with your sweet children. They are so eager to learn each day. Our class will be celebrating with a "Friendsgiving Feast" this month as we reflect on the many things we are thankful for. Our cooking project will be corn muffins that we will share during the feast.

Thank you for sharing your children with us every day!

Be Kind

Be Thoughtful

Be Genuine

But most of all

Be Thankful

Mrs. Hamrick and Mrs. McConnaughhay Kindergarten

We had an exciting time learning all about pumpkins, spiders and Halloween! Thank you so much to all of the parents who helped and sent in special treats for Halloween. The children enjoyed all of the Halloween themed snacks! They also had fun dressing up in their costumes and walking in the costume parade.

November will bring more exciting activities with our Thanksgiving Feast, learning about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving, and making Native American vests and headbands. We will continue working on our letters and letter sounds, learning new sight words and we will start learning about 3-D shapes like spheres, cubes, cones and cylinders. Happy November and thank you for sharing your children with us!

Music with Mrs. Cooke

In the blink of an eye we’ve made it to November! Not only have we grown so much in our knowledge of music but I’ve seen so many of your children simply blossom over these past few months as they’ve connected with many of our activities and songs.

Our counting and listening skills continue to strengthen as we tap and play more intricate rhythms together. Our two and three year old classes are learning all about the dynamic and timing (tempo) of different songs and how we can control the volume and speed of our instruments.

Our VPK and kindergarten classes have made it through all of our initial music terms and we’ll begin a favorite unit of mine where we learn about music from all around the world, different genres throughout the decades, and of course special music that helps us celebrate the holidays!

On that note we will also be gearing up for a special Christmas program to spread some holiday cheer soon enough! More details will come in the next few weeks from either myself or your child’s teacher.

Lastly, the rumor you’ve likely heard from your little ones is true…. I am expecting my first baby GIRL in the spring! It’s so sweet to have a gigantic fan club of preschoolers rooting us on and marveling at my growing belly. Exciting times all around as we enter this holiday season!