Highlights from our week…

It was a full and fun week in Kindergarten! On Monday we celebrated the 100th day of school! It was a very special day of reflecting on God’s faithfulness over the past 100 days. We giggled a lot as many of us dressed up as if we were 100 years old and created portraits of our 100 year old selves. Kids who didn’t dress up and those who did all had an amazing day celebrating together! (I love how Kindergartners just go with it!)

“What will I look like when I’m 100?” — 100 year old portraits

I think a highlight was counting out 100 ingredients in our special snack. THANK YOU to those of you who donated snacks and other supplies to help make our 100th day of school celebration possible!

On Tuesday we celebrated God’s love for us and our love for each other. It was another very special day for our class. Thank you, again, to those of you who helped by donating supplies, running centers, and helping your child bring valentines to pass out.

Important Dates

• February 20: President’s Day Break- No school
• February 23: All school chapel (9:10)
• March 20: Parent Teacher Conferences*- no school
• March 21: Parent Teacher Conferences- full day of school

*More details on signing up for conferences coming soon. 🙂

Important Announcements

• Quarters for Wayne: Kindergarteners will work together to help raise money for our sponsor student in the Philippines by earning quarters throughout the month of February. You may collect quarters directly on the sheet with tape or in a separate Ziploc bag. If you need to view the sheet again, please click here. I would like to have all quarters and/or recording sheets by the end of February please.
• From what I can tell there are two “bugs” going around our classroom- one with severe cold symptoms and the other is the stomach flu. I am doing my best to keep things sanitized and safe at school and I know you are at home too. Winter will be officially over soon and hopefully a long weekend will help! Thank you for your prayers for a healthy class (and teacher!) If your child is sick, please remember to call the office. Thank you!

Check out how much we’re learning and growing in Christ! 

Bible: This week we began our unit on Jesus’ miracles. So far we’ve read about Jesus turning the water to wine at the wedding, the great catch of fish and Jesus’ teaching about being fishers of men, and  Jesus calming the storm. When we learned about being fishers of men we practiced this song that has also been a favorite during our Kindergarten singing time on Friday afternoons.

Literacy: As you probably know our literacy curriculum, which comes from add.a.lingua is written to be taught over 5 days. Occasionally I’ll squeeze it into 4 days if we run into a snow day or something, but with Valentine’s Day and 100th Day both falling this week I felt it was best to review rather than introduce something new. I also new we’d be hitting lots of literacy objectives during our 100th day and Valentine’s Day special activities. Thank you for trusting me to use my best judgement!

With the bit of extra time reviewing gave us, we did something special with the book The Mitten “El Mitón.” Each child laced their own white mitten and practiced retelling the story with their own animals.

In Daily 5 your children are working very hard in Listen to a book, the final of the 5 activities I introduced a couple weeks ago. This week we learned about RazKids. This is an online application that allows me to choose books for kids to listen to at each student’s specific reading levels. It’s also a tool you can use from home if you choose to. (The app is free!) Please see the instructions below.

Kids A-Z Login Instructions:

• Step 1: Go to http://www.kidsa-z.com
• Step 2: Enter or choose my username, mizenbaard
• Step 3: Your child finds his or her username on the class chart.
• Step 4: Your child enters his or her password (Touch the airplane.)

Math: We continue to look for parts of bigger numbers. In particular, we are practicing looking for groups of 5 in bigger numbers. In the afternoon our math centers include opportunities for adding candy hearts, making patterns with candy hearts, flipping 2-sided math counters to make parts of 10, and coloring by numbers with dice.

Writing Workshop: Your kids continue to amaze me as they put their amazing and creative ideas onto paper! This coming week we will choose our favorite pattern books to “fix and fancy.” After that we will celebrate this unit of writing and each child will have the opportunity to share his/her published piece of writing!

Handwriting Without Tears: This week we practiced writing 4 and 5 the school way. We used this knowledge in the context of our teen numbers books and practiced 14 and 15. This was the first week I felt like the students really took to heart that there is a certain way we are expected to write numbers in school, not because Maestra Izenbaard suggests it, but because it’s best for our writing no matter what subject we are working on. I’m glad they are being so diligent!

Exploring God’s World: We dug a little deeper in our learning about motion and classified real life examples of push and pull, for example, pulling weeds, and pushing a shopping cart.

Play: Our 100th day costumes easily transitioned into play this week as the class decided to play grandma and grandpa. I loved the way even the kids without costumes that day were included in the game. I think this coming week, if they’re interested in continuing that play, I’ll suggest we pretend it’s Grandparents Day!

Afternoons:

• Monday: art, rest, read aloud, recess, snack, play
• Tuesday: rest, sorting and graphing candy hearts, recess, snack, play
• Wednesday: rest, math centers, recess, snack, play
• Thursday: rest, math centers, recess, snack, play
• Friday: rest, play, recess, snack, Kindergarten singing

From the immersion coordinator: Did you know that translation is an advanced linguistic and cognitive activity? Most children will not have the cognitive maturity to translate naturally until middle to late elementary; this is not reflective of their understanding of the new language but rather demonstrates the way children’s brains work and develop. Cognates (words that look similar from language to language) usually go unnoticed by the young brain until late elementary or beyond also. Our teachers intentionally make cross-linguistic connections to help our students discover the relationships between their languages.