Welcome to the Family Support Services website. We believe that it is important for parents to know about and be involved in their child/ren's education, so we post monthly information about classroom and after-school activities.

Coopertown Kindergarten Extended Day News

February was a fabulous month. We were able to enjoy record breaking snowfalls that closed the school for almost five amazing days. Students shared many exciting stories about their activities when they returned—including tales about snowboarding, sledding, skiing, and making snow people.

February's curriculum themes were Reptiles, Amphibians, Friendship and the Five Senses. We also enjoyed celebrating and learning about the following holidays: Groundhog Day, Presidents Day, Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day.

We took our first field trip in K-Club this month! We were exposed to a variety of music by the Haverford High School Orchestra and by Carynlin from "Bach to Rock" who performed with her electric violin.

In our Language Arts program, we added the words "here", "an", "at" and "it" to our word wall and added the "–an" word family as well. We continue to practice these words by creating sentences and playing various word games like sight word bingo, stamp/read/write, shake/read/write, and letter dice roll.

We added G, L, K and Q (among others) to our letter journals. We created word lists that pertained to our journal letters, and reviewed rhyming words and letter sounds. We also practiced sentence and story card sequencing after our small group discussions.

During our art center time we created paper bowl turtles, groundhogs in burrows, paper bag frogs, paper plate snakes, stand-up crocodiles, heart people. We also did finger painting, easel painting, ink blot art and textured hand printing. Our bulletin board was decorated with festive Valentine mice and our stained glass hearts are now displayed on our windows.

In our math center we reviewed one to one correspondence, shape, and numeral recognition through bingo and memory games. We also introduced patterns. The students were able to create their own patterns using various materials.

As part of our math curriculum we had a dice roll game that we played with our partners and a "following directions" activity led by our teacher. We discussed the concept of "pairs" after reading A Pair Of Socks, and played a matching game. We also created our own pair of matching socks using patterns.

Dates to Remember:

March 4th—is an ACT 80/Early Dismissal day for all students
March 5th—is a NO SCHOOL day for students, and an in-service for teachers
March 25th & 26th—are Early dismissal days (with conferences) for Elementary students in grades 1-5, but Kindergarten classes will continue to meet as usual.
March 29-April 5th—SPRING VACATION (students return to school Tues, April 6th)

Note – the school closing package will provide coverage for those parents who are signed up on March 4th, 5th, 25th and 26th.

Sincerely,

Mary Bellomo—Site Director
Ashley Pietropaolo—Teacher

Coopertown Extended Day After School Program News

During the month of March we will all be participating in the "wearing of the green," as they say in Ireland, and looking for a bit of gold at the end of the rainbow.

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day the boys and girls will make shamrock shakes, craft shamrock necklaces, and use our creativity to design unique potato heads. We will be growing green hair as well as doing a bit of potato printing. Even our Coopertown Café will feature a menu of all green food.

The children will also be making jewelry boxes, spring dioramas, and trying their hand at hair dryer painting.

We plan to have an "instrumental day" during which we'll be inviting all of the children who play musical instruments to entertain us with a few of the songs they have learned.

Our popular manicure activity will be back this march, along with a Lego shipbuilding contest, and a Pictionary game tournament. Look out for Project Runway, too, because we'll be having our own clothing design day.

All of us are experiencing a bit of cabin fever after being cooped up for so long. Hopefully as the snow melts we'll be able to start playing outside again. I guess we will all have to "Think Spring".

Sincerely,

Joan Strayer, Director of Coopertown After Care
Bob Curran
Nancy Donato
Tory Harrington
Erin Miller
Eric Smith
Michele Wasserman
Jenn Youngers

A Safety Reminder – call when your child is absent

The Coopertown classroom number is 610-527-2281. Please remember to call when your child will not be coming on a scheduled day. Whenever a child does not show up as expected, the teacher must devote time to locate him/her so as to be sure he/she is safe. We care about your children—so do let us know whenever we should not expect them to arrive at our after school program.

Licensing and Teacher Certification credentials

Extended Day programs are state licensed. All site directors and assistant teachers are certified.