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Not a year goes by that I don’t get asked by parents, “What can I do to help my child succeed in school.”  The answer is always the same. It’s simple really.  READ to your child every day ! The single best thing you can do to help your children succeed in school is read out loud to them as often as possible.  
Building vocabulary, learning the shapes of letters and their sounds, being able to absorb the who, what, where and when of the story, and developing “book sense”, are just a few concepts that literary experts have found improve tremendously if you read to your pre-schooler.  “Books sense” is the knowledge that books have covers, beginnings, endings, authors, illustrators as well as text that reads from left to right. 
How good can it get - all the while you are cuddling up with your little one?  So leave those dishes in the sink and that laundry can wait a bit - Go Read!  
                                                       Hugs,  JoAnne

 
 
We hope that your child’s Paperwhite Narcissus flower is bringing some brightness and springtime into your home! (We also hope that you like its very strong scent. Some of the children earnestly proclaimed the smell to be like “a litter box.”) Over the past few weeks the Ducks and Rabbits have been busy observing their plants. We’ve talked a lot about living things and incorporated many math and language arts activities into our study of bulbs. Ask your child to point out the different parts of their plant. Some words they should be familiar with are: roots, shoot, leaf, petal, stem, and flower.

Both the Duck and Rabbit groups took measurements of their plants using interlocking cubes. The right photo above shows one of the Duck’s record of her observations. The Ducks also made several Observational Drawings of the bulbs and blooms (they used magnifying glasses and colored pencils and tried to draw exactly what they saw — just like “scientists”) and kept careful track of their work in a special folder that will be coming home sometime during the next week.
 
 
We had a lot of fun at Pajama & Waffle day last week! The children came to school dressed in their pajamas and we spent the morning talking about sleeping and breakfast while introducing our favorite stuffed animals to one another. All the while, the smell of fresh waffles wafted down from the kitchen where several mom-volunteers were busy mixing up three(!) boxes of Bisquick waffle batter. At least five waffle irons were busily cooking and beeping. After enjoying a delicious snack of waffles, strawberries, whipped cream and REAL maple syrup, we read the story Annabelle’s Awful Waffle by Tracy Dils and snuggled with our bears, dolls and other stuffed animals.

Many thanks to all of the parents who volunteered to cook and clean up and donated food to the cause — especially Ellie’s mom, coordinator extraordinaire!