School Family,

Happy New Year! Best wishes for a healthy and happy new year. It is great to see all of our wonderful students back in session at the Bethune Early Childhood Development Center. As we enter the second half of the school year, we are looking forward to continued partnership with our families.

We will have many events during the second half of the school year. Report cards will be distributed on January 6th, we will honor Dr. Martin Luther King on January 16, 2022. In observance of the holiday, there will be no classes at Bethune.

We will review skills the week of January 3rd. Our upcoming themes for study are Under Construction, Tools, I Can Imagine and My Art is Me. We are continuing our focus on counting and letter recognition. Please support our efforts by asking your child to identify letters and count objects in real life-day-to-day living.

Counting Collections is an activity in which we ask young children to do the following:

• count to figure out how many are in a "collection" of objects (a set of old keys, teddy bear counters, rocks collected from the yard, arts and crafts materials, etc.)
• make a written representation of what they counted and how they counted it

Similar to other kinds of counting activities, the goal is to engage students in coordinating the various aspects of counting in order to find out how many are in the given set of objects. What might be different about Counting Collections, however, is that children are encouraged to count and represent in ways that make sense to them without an adult doing a demonstration first. As children count, they might move objects in and out of containers, organize in a line, sort into groups by color, slide from one pile to another, etc.

As children represent their collection, by drawing the count, they might trace the objects, make a series of small marks and place the objects on top to make sure they match, write a sequence of numerals, etc.

Also, "collections" often have more objects than are usually given to young children (such as a collection of 21 colorful dinosaurs) which often encourages children to organize and to count further in the counting sequence.

Taken from DREME TE

Students match the uppercase and lowercase foam or magnetic letters that are the same. You could also use purchased or handmade letter tiles.

Taken from PreKinders.com

Our students returned to school on January 3, 2023, to find new furniture and teaching materials in the classrooms.

School Families,

Please send your child to school daily. We are working on teaching the students and this time of the year is critical. Students who come to school regularly learn more and enjoy coming to more. Consistent attendance also prepares your child to be responsible in the future. We look forward to seeing our PreK scholars daily.