This time of year it is easy to get caught up in the rush of the Christmas holiday and lose focus on what is the true meaning of Christmas. I am so blessed to be able to teach our students about Jesus’ birth and talk openly about God at St. James. The children have memorized songs, lines, and moving parts which requires a tremendous amount of focus and commitment. It isn’t easy to perform in front of a large audience especially when it is full of your loved ones. I am very proud of their determination and hard work.

To conclude our Bread Study, we took a trip to Gusano’s to answer our focus question, “Who works with bread?” The students not only had the chance to visit a restaurant, but they also rolled out pizza dough and made their own pizzas—sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and all! The best part was getting to enjoy the delicious pizzas they created. A big thank you to Gusano's for their wonderful hospitality and for hosting St. James Day School Pre-K! Our students had an amazing experience!

Our Pre-K classes chose to help pack boxes at Harvest Regional Food Bank as our community service project this year. We felt it was important for the children to donate their time in a meaningful, hands-on way. Through this experience, our students learned what community service is, why it matters, what a food bank does, and how it helps people in our community.

Before our field trip, we asked our students two guiding questions:

What is community service?

Community service is doing helpful work for your neighborhood or town. It is work you do for free—giving your time and effort instead of getting money. Community service makes a positive difference and helps build a stronger community.

What is a food bank?

A food bank is a place where people donate food to help those who don’t have enough to eat. It is like a grocery store, but people do not have to pay money to get their food.

Sorting & graphing helps children look at numbers in different ways. Starting them with graphs when they are young helps them count items quickly, organize, compare, and discuss information. We used skittles on a turkey body to make graphing fun!

Our focus question for the week was, “How are roads made?”

We explored who builds and repairs roads and had such a fun morning learning all about the process! The students discovered the materials used in making and repairing roads, the importance of being in the right car seat and always buckling up, and how deep builders must dig to begin a road. They also learned to watch out for workers in orange, mapped a route from their home to school, and even saw a dump truck up close

A big thank you to TxDOT for helping us answer our focus question and for making this the best morning ever!

Our Pre-K students had their first magical encounter with Dash and Dot, and it was a hands-on tech adventure full of giggles and discovery! They learned how to connect the robots via Bluetooth, watching in awe as their tablets brought Dash and Dot to life. With tiny fingers tapping and dragging, they explored how to change the robots’ glowing colors, add playful sounds, and send them scooting across the floor. This tactile experience helps build early coding confidence and digital curiosity, all wrapped in joyful exploration. By controlling the robots themselves, our little learners practice problem-solving, cause and effect, and creative expression—proving once again that the best learning happens when kids get to play, touch, and tinker.

What a beautiful morning for blowing bubbles, and celebrating the letter B.

The children were given backpacks with uppercase letters, and had to find the lunchbox with the matching lowercase letter. After finding the match they had to use a link to hook them together. Alphabet matching is an early literacy activity designed to enhance letter recognition skills, which are crucial for reading and writing development.

We had visits from a turtle, cat, kittens, baby chicks, and two show horses named Jasmine and Holly. A special thank you to the parents for taking time out of your day to share your pets with us!

What a great morning we had celebrating all the special loved ones in our lives. A special thank you to everyone who brought food, and to our room moms for making everything beautiful!