- Hello, little learners.

Welcome back to a brand new school year.

Yay!

First day of school.

First day of school.

Are we excited for our first week of school?

My name is Ms. Lara, and I'm hoping that you're having a wonderful first week of school.

If that's where you go, or if you're enjoying school with me, we're starting off our brand new school year here on Reading Explorers too.

Shall we start our day off with a song?

I have Miss Maria here today.

Let's sing our good morning song.

Ready?

♪ Good morning ♪ ♪ Good morning ♪ ♪ It's a sunshine kind of day ♪ ♪ Come join Mrs. Lara for some learning and some play ♪ ♪ Where we sing some songs ♪ Of course, we will.

♪ Make our brains strong ♪ Like super strong.

♪ So come along ♪ ♪ Yes come on friends for some learning and some play.

♪ Miss.

Maria, I know you're gonna deliver the mail to me later.

So I'm gonna put you down.

Now all this week we're talking about school and I'm introducing you to some book characters that have gone to school and maybe have not done the right things.

You wanna check out yesterday's episode.

We read "No, David," the story of a little boy who's just trying to figure himself out, isn't he?

And figure out how to put on clothes when he runs down the street.

Now, today we have a whole new book that we're going to read with a very special character who's also trying to figure out what to do in this thing called school.

Now I think that Miss Maria left us a letter that we're going to read.

Let me see.

I think I hear her.

(doorbell rings) Uh.

There's her doorbell.

Here's the letter now.

Let's start reading it together.

So this letter is going to start on the left and we're gonna slide to the right.

So let's do our song.

♪ This is the left ♪ (snaps finger) ♪ This is the right ♪ (snaps finger) ♪ When we read we start at the left and go to the right ♪ (snaps finger) It says, dear Mrs. Lara, will there be other kids at school?

Yes, there's gonna be lots of other friends at school.

Will they be my friend?

I do not wanna be lonely.

Oh no, that would be the worst.

How can I make friends at school?

Love.

Oh, T-Rex and the T-Rex is saying help.

How can we make friends at school?

I think we're gonna learn about that character later and how she makes friends at school.

I think Miss Maria left me some book clues too.

Let's see.

There's some paint.

I wonder what this book is gonna have to do with paint.

I know that's something we do in school and some letters, hmm.

Something else that we do in school.

There's a lunch bag.

If you're going to transitional kindergarten you can eat lunch at school.

Preschool, not so much.

And there's an egg.

I wonder.

Hhm.

And nervous, nervous.

Let me see.

We pull out the book and see what it has to do with our clues.

Are you ready for the book?

Doo-doo dooo.

"We Don't Eat Our Classmates."

Oh no.

"We Don't Eat Our Classmates."

There's Penelope Rex our books, our character that wrote the letter.

This is written by Ryan Huggins.

He's the author of the book.

Now you'll remember the author writes the words and you can see from the front cover, you Penelope Rex has drool coming from her and a shoe, Oh no.

She has a diet of children, I think.

Now, before we read this book, I wanna preview the story.

We're going to do a picture walk.

That means without reading the words, we're gonna try to predict what the story is about.

So, let's go through.

There's a little T-Rex, and let's look at her facial.

Looks a little nervous, doesn't she?

Oh, and there she is playing with her toys.

She even has a little dinosaur toy and her mother is coming to get her.

And lots of sandwiches.

I guess that's what the lunch was about.

And she's going to a strange building.

Where do you think she might be going?

And in that building, there's lots of children.

But the children have disappeared.

Where could they have gone?

There's a shoe coming from Penelope's mouth.

Oh no, Penelope.

Look she's even at the bottom of the slide trying to eat the children.

And no one is playing with her.

No, I wonder if it's because she's trying to eat them.

Here she is talking to a grownup and maybe feeling a little sad in bed.

Why do you think that she's feeling sad?

I wonder.

And she's gonna meet a goldfish.

What does that have to do with anything?

And she's gonna put her finger in the goldfish bowl.

I wonder what's going to happen.

I skipped a few pages, but here is towards the end.

She looks a little nervous to do that again, huh?

Actually the end, she runs away from the goldfish.

I wonder what the goldfish did.

Hey, do you have some predictions in your mind?

Let's read the story and see if they're true.

"We Don't Eat Our Classmates."

Let's start.

"Penelope Rex was nervous.

It's not every day, a little T-Rex starts school.

So there she is making a nervous face like this, Ooh.

What are my classmates going to be like?

Will they be nice?

How many teeth will they have?

This was very important to Penelope.

Look there she is still nervous.

Penelope's mom brought her a new backpack with ponies on it.

Ponies were Penelope's favorite because ponies are delicious.

Oh no, do you eat ponies?

Penelope's dad packed her a lunch of 300 tuna sandwiches.

Whoa, that's a lot of tuna sandwiches.

And of course, one apple juice to wash it all down.

Finally, the big day came and Penelope Rex was very surprised to find out that all of her classmates were children.

Look at all those children and look her teacher is a grownup human too.

So of course, she ate them.

They were delicious.

"Penelope Rex," said her teacher, Mrs. Noodleman, "We don't eat our classmates.

Please spit them out at once."

Ha poi.

So she did.

(laughs) Look at all the children, they are covered in Penelope's spit.

You, it's not the very best way to start school.

Still Penelope was determined to have a good first day.

She tried hard to make friends at recess.

So there she is, the kids going down the slide right into her mouth.

She finger painted some of her best work.

And if you can see what she's painting, she's painting herself with a mouth wide open eating a child.

She even saved Griffin Emery, a seat at lunch.

"You can sit here."

She has all those tuna sandwiches.

I bet those don't smell very good.

At least 300 of them.

Penelope started to notice everyone was making friends but her it was lonely.

Oh, she's so sad.

When she got home, her dad asked about her first day of school.

"Oh," she said, "I didn't make any friends.

None of children wanted to play with me."

"Penelope Rex," her father asked, "Did you eat your classmates?"

"Well, maybe sort of a little bit," She said.

"Sometimes it's hard to make friends," said her dad.

"Especially if you eat them.

You see Penelope, children are the same as us on the inside just tastier."

That gave Penelope a lot to think about.

So there she is thinking.

The next day, Penelope tried really, really hard, but poor Penelope, she could not stop herself from eating her classmates.

"Mrs. Noodleman, Penelope ate William again."

There he is.

We must be really tasty as humans to T-Rex's, huh?

And they were all afraid of her.

She would come in and the children would go, "Ah.

No, Tonny, me."

Except Walter.

Walter was a goldfish.

So Penelope tried to make friends with him.

"Will you be my friend?"

Penelope said.

And Walter swam right up to Penelope's finger and said, "Chomp."

Now it was Penelope's turn to get eaten.

She didn't like that, she said, "Ihh, he's eating my finger, whaah."

Look at him biting his finger.

Once Penelope found out what it was like to be someone snack, she lost her appetite for children.

She stopped eating her classmates.

Even when Cece Woodman spilled barbecue sauce all over herself.

And soon Penelope made friends.

Look she's playing hide and go seek with the slide instead of trying to eat the children.

"Want a brownie?

I help make them."

She asked her new friends.

Now, even when children look especially delicious, she peeks out Walter and remembers what it's like when someone tries to eat you, Oh.

And Walter the goldfish stares right back at her and licks his lips.

Ahh, because dinosaurs are delicious."

The end.

Now, what did you think of that story?

Just like David Penelope T-Rex was learning how to behave in school.

I guess rule number one should be don't eat your friends, huh, even if they're delicious and covered with barbecue sauce.

Now, since Penelope is learning, I want us to go through a few scenarios together and play a little game called, stomp it out.

So I have a little dinosaur stomper here and we're gonna try to stomp out all those behaviors and things that Penelope should not be doing in school.

Let's read a few of them.

Penelope, the teacher play Penelope's favorite song.

She decided to stance along.

What do you think should Penelope have done that?

Yes.

We didn't need to stomp that out in school.

There's lots of fun music to sing to and dance to.

When Penelope Rex got home from her first day of school, she decided to not talk to her parents about how bad she was feeling.

So you'll remember in our story, Penelope was feeling really bad.

And in our story, she talked to her parents.

But what if she didn't?

What if she kept that all inside and didn't talk to anyone?

Should we stomp that out?

Yeah, I think so.

Stomp.

Really what you should do when you're feeling sad or have a strong feeling, always best to talk to someone, people listening can help you, help you feel better and they can tell you and teach you things to do with those strong feelings.

Like take belly breath.

Let's read another one.

Let's see.

Penelope was lonely.

She did not know how to make friends at school.

What do you think?

Should she stay lonely?

Would you feel nice staying lonely at school when you couldn't make friends?

No, let's stomp that out.

So what can she do to make friends?

So remember in the story, first thing was, Penelope don't eat your friends.

The second thing is you can come up to them and introduce yourself.

Say, "Hi, my name is."

You say, "Do you wanna play?"

And of course you talk to someone if they're not playing with you or not sharing.

A grownup can always help you out.

Let's do a couple more.

On her first day of school, Penelope Rex bit one of her classmates.

Oh no, I have been a teacher a long time and it's not just dinosaurs that bite, little kids bite too.

Are you supposed to do that at school?

No, stomp that out.

We keep our hands, feet, and objects to ourselves.

No biting anything but our lunch.

One last time.

When it's time for arts, Penelope Rex took out all the paints and made a big mess.

She left all of her mess behind when she went to play at the art center.

Now, I want you to think about that.

She left all of her mess behind.

When you're in school, you're responsible for picking up after yourself.

That's one of the rules, isn't it?

So we have to stomp that one out.

That's bad behavior.

We don't do that at school.

We're learning to clean up after ourselves.

Looks like we got through all of them.

I hope that helps Penelope Rex.

Now, before we move on to our project place in the morning with our good morning song, I forgot to run through our school song.

So let's do that together.

Do you remember our school song?

We're gonna sing it twice.

And it goes like this.

♪ Climb aboard the school bus ♪ ♪ Climb Climb ♪ ♪ We're heading off to school ♪ You make your arms go like this.

♪ Hurry and get ready you gotta hurry ♪ ♪ We're going to leave soon ♪ ♪ Put on your seatbelt kuchh ♪ ♪ And buckle up tight ♪ ♪ 'Cause here comes the countdown so count ♪ ♪ with all your might ♪ ♪ So put your 10 fingers up here we go ♪ ♪ 10 nine ♪ ♪ Eight seven ♪ ♪ Six five ♪ ♪ Four three ♪ ♪ Two one ♪ ♪ And the bus goes ♪ ♪ We're going to school it's bumpy ♪ Glad we have our seatbelt on Let's do it one more time so you can help me with it.

Here it goes.

♪ Climb aboard the school bus ♪ ♪ We're heading off to school ♪ ♪ Hurry up and get ready ♪ ♪ We're going to leave soon ♪ ♪ Put on your seatbelt ♪ ♪ Buckle up tight because here comes the countdown ♪ ♪ So count with all your might ♪ ♪ 10 fingers here we go ♪ ♪ 10 nine ♪ ♪ eight seven ♪ ♪ Six five ♪ ♪ Four three ♪ ♪ Two one ♪ ♪ Here we go on the bus it's bumpy ♪ Actually we can ride the bus over to our project place and we're gonna make dinosaurs stompers.

Are you ready to make them with me?

Come on, let's go.

Oh, I get so excited when I get to do anything that has to do with dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs are my favorite.

And the character in our story is a dinosaur, isn't she?

So, these are the dinosaur stompers that I made earlier to show you.

Now I thought it would be really fun for you to stomp into a new school year.

You can also practice stomping out letters by laying out letters on the floor, on post-it notes.

Or you can draw letters on chalk on the sidewalk and stomp out letters.

And you can also like we did a play stomp it out with different scenarios.

So parents, if you have children that are maybe having trouble getting ready for school, because having to wake up early is hard when you're four years old, maybe write down little scenarios and have them walk through and stomp through the things that they maybe should do differently.

So here's the materials that I use to make my stompers.

For these, I used cardboard.

You can see in the back and I cut it out.

Now I will tell you, this is an adult activity because cutting with cardboard is really hard.

You can certainly help trace them if you're four or five years old.

And I cut two of them the same to look kind of like dinosaurs.

And then I cut out a little moon shape.

This is where your feet are gonna go, see kind of moves up.

So you put the stompers right on your feet and through your shoe just like that.

And I used some green paints to make them extra realistic.

So I'm gonna put those aside.

Now, if you don't want to use cardboards, they're not so durable.

I've also done this with paper and I will tell you that the paper ones work just fine.

Children that are in preschool and TK, don't tend to have a long attention span.

So you don't have to invest in cutting out some cardboard ones and painting them unless you think that they're really going to use them.

So I'm going to use some green paper, marker, glue stick, scissor and some crayons to make this activity.

So I have two pieces of green paper and I'm actually gonna stack them on top of each other.

This will help me cut them once and trace once.

So now I'm gonna trace out some dinosaur feet.

Now I like to make them super long, like this.

I'm gonna do three of them.

You can do however many you want.

I'll show you in just a bit.

I make them long and thin, and then have a little section at the bottom like this, just like this.

See, kind of looks like a strange kind of wavier, or cactus, huh?

(laughs) Then what you're going to do is you're gonna cut it out like this.

Now cutting out these strange shape is really good for practicing scissor skills.

So the stranger and wavier you may come the better.

So here I go, cutting around, and around.

Now when I first started cutting lots and lots of years ago, I actually used to make little thin little fingers when I cut out hands.

(laughs) I've never knew quite how to control the scissors.

So if that's you don't worry just use them.

They'll look just fine in the end.

Keep going, go all the way around.

I added more stuff for our scrap pile.

So you can see we have two dinosaur feet now.

So next, what you're gonna do is you're gonna make a little moon shapes.

Let me draw it out for you.

It kind of looks like No, David's smile, actually, just like that.

And this is gonna be where your feet go.

You can also tie them using yarn.

But I find that this actually works really well if you draw kind of the shape.

So next we're going to cut out in the middle.

I just fold it and cut.

So I can have a place to put my scissors and cut out my shape, here we go.

It kinda looks like a boomerang.

And around.

And down.

There we go.

And this is where you're going to put your feet.

Just like that put your feet in here.

And you've made dinosaur stompers.

Now I know what you're thinking.

Mrs. Lara, these look really plain.

Ah, that's where the crayons come in and you can actually use the paper to make scales or add anything you'd like.

So I'm gonna open up my crowns and I'm gonna make some scales on my dinosaur.

So that's just a lot of U-shapes like this.

And I'll show you how I make a few here on one so you can see it.

You can also just color it if you like.

Will be really fun to use tissue paper, huh?

I'll show you what it's looking like so far like that.

And then I'll show, once I finish this one, I'll tell you how I make some funky nails because dinosaurs don't wear shoes, 'cause their nails are super, super dirty and long.

'Cause they never cut them.

Here we go.

All around, all around.

Almost there.

You can see the scales.

Now, what color should my nails be?

What do you think?

Should I make some green nails maybe be some brown nails?

Oh, brown nails sounds good.

So you can see.

Look at this half a crayon.

There's a book about that.

When you break your crayons, you shouldn't throw them away.

Here is what my dinosaur foot's looking like, then I'm gonna make a little nail just like that all the way down.

Oh, they're super long.

Here we go.

So, here is our dinosaur foot and you can see how you can just kind of put it in like this if this were my foot.

And they go right on top like this, and you can walk around, and stomp different things like I said, letters, through scenarios, you can play dancing games with them.

Lots of different things that you can do.

I think Penelope T-Rex would be proud.

So, I hope that you try this activity at home, boys and girls.

And if you do, send me a little note or picture, I'd love to see how they turn out.

So right now I'm gonna tell you what we're going to do tomorrow.

We're going to read another book about a character that is also struggling to go to school, but this character just doesn't want to get out of bed.

Oh, they're grumpy.

They're like, "Why, why is school in the morning?

Why can't I sleep until noon, maybe go to school for 20 minutes and then come home and eat donuts."

Oh, and this character happens to be a pigeon.

You might know who I'm talking about.

I hope that you come back then.

For now let's sing our A, B, C goodbye song.

Here we go.

♪ A B ♪ ♪ C letter ♪ ♪ D E ♪ ♪ F G I'm gonna miss ya H ♪ ♪ I have to go now J ♪ ♪ K bye-bye now ♪ ♪ L M N ♪ ♪ O I had a good time.

♪ ♪ P Q ♪ ♪ R you're gonna miss me ♪ ♪ S T ♪ ♪ U are my best friend ♪ ♪ V W ♪ ♪ X Y Z ♪ That's right, boys and girls who are my best friend.

And hopefully, I get to Z you tomorrow.

So, the activity that we're going to be doing tomorrow is making up pigeon mask.

Because like I said, our character is a pigeon.

So if you'd like to join me in making that activity, you'll need a paper plate, some blue paint, white paper, black paper, scissors, and a glue stick.

And our pigeon mask is going to help us write some things that start with our special letter, which is the first letter of our name.

So I hope that you gather those supplies and join me tomorrow as we read more books and have more fun.

I really do hope you're having a great first day of school.

Op, my pencil fell.

Boys and girls.

So until then, Mrs. Lara is gonna send you up big squeeze and a big smooch.

We'll see you then, goodbye.