'Tis the Season!
Pre-K Christmas Program
Each year, St. James Pre-K students present a retelling of the first Christmas. Through the process of preparing for their program, the children learn the story of the birth of Jesus, memorize songs, lines, and movement, and then have the opportunity to perform in front of a large audience full of the people they love most. I am so proud of their determination, courage, and hard work!!!
Community service
The Pre-K classes chose to help pack boxes at Harvest Regional Food Bank as our community service project this year. We felt it was important for the children to donate their time in a meaningful, hands-on way. Through this experience, our students learned what community service is, why it matters, what a food bank does, and how it helps people in our community.
Before our field trip, we asked our students two guiding questions:
What is community service?
Community service is doing helpful work for your neighborhood or town. It is work you do for free—giving your time and effort instead of getting money. Community service makes a positive difference and helps build a stronger community.
What is a food bank?
A food bank is a place where people donate food to help those who don’t have enough to eat. It is like a grocery store, but people do not have to pay money to get their food.
Bread Study Field Trip
To conclude our Bread Study, we took a trip to Gusano’s to answer our focus question, “Who works with bread?” The students not only had the chance to visit a restaurant, but they also rolled out pizza dough and made their own pizzas—sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and all! The best part was getting to enjoy the delicious pizzas they created. A big thank you to Gusano's for their wonderful hospitality and for hosting St. James Day School Pre-K! Our students had an amazing experience!
Chicka Chicka HO HO HO
We read Chicka Chicka Ho Ho Ho written by William Boniface and illustrated by Julien Chung. This festive story is wonderful for reinforcing alphabet recognition and building language skills through its catchy, playful rhyme.After our read-aloud, students were given green paper cutouts along with the letters in their names. Each child practiced spelling their name to create their own Christmas tree. It was so much fun to see which names were short and which were long, and to watch them recall and arrange the letters to form their names!
Science with Butter
We are wrapping up our Bread study, and what a wonderful way to finish! A huge thank you to Cece’s mom, Ellen, for collecting baby food jars so our class could make homemade butter. During this activity, we explored Objective 26: demonstrating knowledge of the physical properties of objects and materials.
We talked about liquids versus solids and observed how the heavy cream started as a liquid and, with shaking (adding energy), transformed into a solid—BUTTER! The children strengthened their gross motor skills while shaking their jars and then used fine motor skills to spread their freshly made butter on their bread.
It was a fun, hands-on learning experience for everyone!