Greetings from St. Paul Pre-School! We are a dynamic team of three teachers; Tina Gorozdi, Annemarie Romeo and Christine Schulz, as well as five teaching assistants; Elizabeth Brodsky, Vanessa Grieco, Nicole Leto, Leenu Stephen and Geeta Uppal.  All of our pre-school classrooms provide loving and nurturing learning environments where children are encouraged to discover answers on their own.  While social, emotional and spiritual development is the cornerstone of our daily interactions, there are so many opportunities for exploring and enjoying the world around them. 
Our preschool follows the Creative Curriculum.  This center-based curriculum features exploration and discovery as a way of learning and enabling children to develop confidence, creativity and critical thinking skills.  Each day, the children engage in hands-on activities that are designed to capture their interest and feed their curiosity.  Discovery and exploration provide a role in each lesson. 
At this time, we are studying buildings in our community and around the world.  We are reading stories about constructing buildings, learning the attributes of local buildings and comparing these structures to buildings around the world. 
Within each unit of study, we make a specific effort in eliciting students’ interests.  It is from these interests where we scaffold our lessons from and produce our projects.  Using our comparative charts and diagrams, students have been able to broaden our class discussions on buildings and even delve deeper in literary skills by taking notice of the similarities and differences of variations of The Three Little Pigs.
In English Language Arts, we created a classroom word wall comprised of construction and building terms.  The children browse through non-fiction books and identify vocabulary.  We discuss the new terms and we add it to our wall.   In Mathematics, the students are sorting blocks by color, shape and size, creating patterns with blocks and counting the blocks in their structures.
All of our preschool students worked together to create a mural of a city skyline by stamping varying shapes. We also painted and built a city of cardboard boxes.  The students identified the buildings in their city and designed them accordingly.  We are learning so much and having fun in the process!
As a school, we just finished celebrating Catholic Schools Week.  We started the week off with Sunday mass, followed by an open house.  We enjoyed meeting all the new families at the open house and look forward to welcoming them into our St. Paul School family. 
During Catholic Schools Week, the pre-school students watched and cheered at the faculty versus students’ volleyball game.  It was a very exciting game! Later in the week, we celebrated at the Winter Wonderland Dance. The preschool students showed off their dance moves.  All of the festivities were exciting and fun!!
The fun doesn’t stop there!  St. Paul School is offering a Mommy and Me Movement Program on Thursdays from 9:00-10:30 AM.  It is a six-week program, running from January 30 ^th through March 5 ^th. This program is free of charge and all children between the ages of 18 months and 4 years old are welcome!!  Our UPK teaching assistant, Elizabeth Brodsky, will be facilitating the class.  Please call our school office (845-268-6506) to register for the class. 
We look forward to meeting you!! Please stop in to see our “city” and explore our preschool.