News: Bellwood Elementary

Preschool News

by Lyne Rerucha

September 18, 2008

What a time we have had exploring the concept of community! Our first community outing was taking our family helping letters to the post office where we learned how our mail is delivered. The next day we took a walk about Bellwood and took note of all the beautiful trees around town. I told the children that Bellwood was originally named Bell’s Wood because a man named Jesse Bell planted many of the trees here. To celebrate the name of our community the children created some beautiful trees of their own which we proudly displayed in our classroom.

While on our walk we also took note of various traffic signs, street signs, fire hydrants and cross walks. We used all these opportunities to discuss safety and community awareness. On our return to our classroom we took out our large plastic floor map of a generic town and compared our community of Bellwood to the town portrayed on the map. We discovered that both towns had a post office, churches, bank, school, gas station, fire station, and park. However, Bellwood was different in that it did not have a hospital, a car wash, a zoo, a pizza place, or a police station.

To connect to our community and our study of the map further I invited Sheriff Mark Hecker and his dispatcher Sherri Meysenburg to come and share with us about their jobs and how they help us stay safe living in our community. We each had the opportunity to practice dialing 911 and then we practiced what we would say to the dispatcher if we ever had to call 911. Best of all we all got to sit in the sheriff’s truck see the lights and turn on the various sirens!

The theme for our sensory table was also linked to our community. Instead of water in the water table, the children had the opportunity to explore field corn. Many of the children spent considerable time shelling the corn and learning about the properties of corn. We extended our vocabularies to include words such as husk, ear, silk, kernel, and cob. We then extended our corn experience to include cooking when we made corn meal muffins. Yum!

We concluded our community awareness unit by taking a trip to the Little Pine Ridge Feed Yards located just east of Bellwood. Colin’s family operates the feed yard and they have volunteered to show us how they take care of all those cows! On our trip we got to see how the cow’s feed is ground and how they add molasses to make it taste sweet. We met the horses that are ridden every morning to check the cows. They loved all our attention! The children were able to see the cows up close as we stood near their feed bunks. The best part of our trip was the awesome tractor ride! Thanks to Dave Hough for all the time he spent with us that day!