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All About Me/Feelings Themes

The first week of school, we spend practicing our routine and getting comfortable with coming to school.  The next couple of weeks, we spend getting to know ourselves and each other. We do an All About Me Theme followed by a Feelings Theme.
 We create cutouts of ourselves and display them to show our differences and connectedness. I love how each cutout looks different.
 We talk a lot about how we are each special and unique. We compare eye colors and hair colors. We talk about our families and who is in each family. We draw pictures of ourselves and our families including any pets we have. We do name activities where we count how many letters are in our names and then we use letter tiles to make our names.  We compare each child's name to the other names in the class and look at beginning letters and syllables.
 We also graph some of our favorites, such as colors, animals, foods, or sports. We draw pictures of our friends and copy our friends' names. Each child gets a day where they are interviewed by myself and their classmates. I write their answers on large chart paper and then once everyone has been interviewed, I combine them into a class book with each child's picture.  Each page says something like this:
"My name is _________.
I have ____ letters in my name.
My favorite color is ______.
My favorite animal is ______.
My favorite food is ______."

Some good Preschool books about Feelings and All About Me are:
*"The Feelings Book"
*"When Sophie Gets Angry, Really Really Angry"
*"Llama Llama Misses Mama"
*"Wemberly Worried"
*"The Way I Feel"
*"Llama Llama Mad at Mama"
*"The Pout Pout Fish"
*"Only One You"
*"Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon"
*"Chrysanthemum"

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