September 2017 archive

Newsletter 4: Week of September 24

Week Overview

Happy fall! While it doesn’t feel like fall outside yet it has been fun to welcome in this new season with a few special activities at school. On Friday we made applesauce. While we took turns preparing the apples, we searched for articles el and la in the applesauce book that we made together. I’m very, very proud of your kindergarteners and their positive attitude this week despite being hot and sticky. A huge thank you to Aubrey’s mom who brought us popsicles to enjoy after PE on Friday! I’m encouraged by your children’s eagerness to learn and excitement to be together. I hear we may even experience some cooler temperatures at the end of this week! I’m looking forward to being a little more comfortable at school. 🙂


Important Dates

September 21/October 10: TRIP Registration Meeting

September 26: Field trip to DeGraaf Nature Center

October 3: Picture Day

October 6: No PM busing/no hot lunch

October 19-20: CEA Convention (No School)


Reminders

  • Field Trip: We will head to the DeGraaf Nature Center on Tuesday morning. I have a number of moms who have signed up to drive. Your child will ride in a booster seat that will be provided to them by ZCS or by the mom who is driving. You do not need to send a booster seat along for this field trip. We will leave school around 9:00 and be back to school around 11:30. There will be a snack provided for everyone on the trip. (Thank you Westerbeke and Nichols families! )There is no need to send a morning snack. If your child is staying for lunch they will need their lunch and an afternoon snack. Hot lunch will be available if you’d like your child to order before we leave. Please dress your child for the weather, including outdoor shoes. We will be outside for most of the trip. If you have questions, please let me know!
  • Yearbooks: Are available for order at the same time as school pictures on the order form. (Option #14) This is the ONLY time yearbooks will be available for order this year. Don’t miss out!
  • Library: Tomorrow (Monday) we will visit the library again! If your child would like to pick out a new book, please help them remember to bring their old book to school and put it in the bin in our classroom.

Curriculum

Bible: We closed our unit on creation by reading the whole creation story together with the Bibles Mr. McAboy presented to us several days ago! This was a very special moment for our class. The kids loved following along in their own Bibles as I read the words out loud. I hope you and your kindergartener were able to look through your child’s own creation book. I think they did an awesome job illustrating the work of our Amazing Creator!

We’ve also started practicing our Bible memory verse. I’ll assess this verse sometime in a few weeks and we’ll continue practicing at school in the meantime. This would be a great addition to family devotions or bedtime routine. Please visit our Bible Verses tab to see a video to help your child practice at home. (Please don’t laugh at me too hard! I’m not above looking like a fool to help your child!) 🙂

Genesis 8:22 “Mientras la tierra exista habrá siembra y cosecha, frío y calor, verano e invierno, días y noches.”

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”

Literacy: The kids have been doing an awesome job building their stamina in read to self. Someone asked what we do when we reach our goal of reading for 10 minutes on 5 days. The kids were SO excited to learn about the other 4 choices in the Daily 5! We will get there soon!

Our linguistic focus this week was articles, el and la. In Spanish all nouns have genders. El is used for masculine nouns and la is used for feminine nouns. Usually masculine nouns end in -o and feminine nouns end in -a. We noticed the articles before each noun and practiced classifying them together!

  • Reading strategy: Determining importance of text
  • Read aloud: Un beso en mi mano
  • Vocabulary Words:
    • el beso (kiss)
    • el mapache (raccoon)
    • el corazón (heart)
    • la mano (hand)
  • Phrase of the week: Ayúdame por favor. (Help me please.)
  • Letter of the week: Oo

Handwriting: We worked on writing uppercase and lowercase Oo. As you watch your child write at home, consider reminding them to start writing their letters at the top.

Book of Friends: We “met” tow more new friends this week. Olivia and Asa! Your kids are getting very good at looking for the vowels and noticing that only the first letter is an uppercase letter.

Math: We continued to work in our scenes books. As we sweat like crazy this week we drew cold scenes including popsicles and snowmen for numbers 2 and 3. 🙂

Exploring God’s World: We continued to explore our 5 senses, this time focusing on our sense of touch. We classified objects as hot or cold and colored them red and blue respectively.

Up in Lights: We’re looking forward to starting this soon! Please visit our “other resources” page on our blog to see the date of your child’s turn and the English translation of these papers.

Afternoons: This week in the afternoon, in addition to rest, art, kindergarten singing and recess we worked in our math centers, created an Oo book, and played in Maestro Minkus’ air-conditioned classroom on Friday afternoon.


I wanted to take this opportunity to re-introduce myself to our immersion families. My name is Jodi Pierce, and I serve as the director of our immersion programs. Among other professional experiences, I have taught in the immersion setting abroad, served as the director of another immersion program prior to ZCS, and hold a MA in Dual Language and Immersion Education. I am passionate about the opportunities that immersion education offers our students, and I am determined to help our staff make our immersion program the best it can be. If you have any immersion-related questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to stop by my office (Office #69 between the media center and gym) or send me an email (pierce@zcs.org). It is a blessing to be partnering with you in the education of your children!

Newsletter 3: Week of September 17

Week Overview

It was an awesome first 5-day week! Your kids are troopers and did a wonderful job even as they got a little more worn out by Friday afternoon. They are rock stars! We had a very special meeting with all 5 kindergarten classes and Mr. MacAboy in the library this week. Mr. MacAboy taught us the Bible is like the glasses we use to look at all of life. When he wore his blue, red, and yellow glasses the things he saw changed colors. When we look at the world through the lens of the Bible we see the world differently. After his lesson every kindergartener was given a Bible to use at school during their days at kindergarten. In 1st grade they will get a different Bible and they will leave their kindergarten Bible at school for the next class. I can’t wait to continue digging into God’s Word with your children!


Important Dates

September 21/October 10: TRIP Registration Meeting

September 26: Field trip to DeGraaf Nature Center

October 3: Picture Day

October 19-20: CEA Convention (No School)


Reminders

  • Please continue to send your child’s red folder back and forth to school each day. I encourage you to find a routine that works best for your family to be sure it gets pulleId out and looked at each day after school.
  • I’d love if you could send your child a water bottle to school each day.
  • Tomorrow (Monday) we will visit the library again! If your child would like to pick out a new book, please help them remember to bring their old book to school and put it in the bin in our classroom.

Curriculum

 

Bible: We continue to talk about God’s amazing creation. Each kindergartener is creating a book  with a page for each day of creation. This past week we made the pages for days 3 and 4. We’re learning a song called “Quien Hizo el Mundo,” “Who Made the World” to celebrate our Creator. 

Literacy: Our grammar focus this week was nouns. We learned that a noun is a person, place, or thing. We learned a song to remember the different kinds of nouns and practiced classifying nouns. We also met 2 new friends, Ana, a girl we helped look for words with Aa. and a squirrel (ardilla) whom we met through a poem.

  • Reading strategy: Determining importance of text
  • Read aloud: No te comas a la maestra (Don’t Eat the Teacher! :))
  • Vocabulary Words:
    • el bacalao (cod)
    • el torbellino (tornado)
    • el pincel (paintbrush)
    • avergonzado (embarrassed)
    • se zambulló (dove)
  • Phrase of the week: Buenos días (good morning) Buenas tardes (good afternoon)
  • Letter of the week: Aa

Handwriting: We worked on writing uppercase and lowercase a. As you watch your child write at home, consider remind them to start writing their letters at the top. 

Book of Friends: We “met” two new friends this week. Ava and Aubrey! We were focusing on names that have A as the first letter because it was our letter of the week.

Math: We read a book called Anno’s Counting Book. Each page is illustrated with a scene that represents a number 0-10. Now we’re working on making a book with our own illustrations. We completed pages for numbers 0 and 1. Your kids can’t wait to show you their books!

Exploring God’s World: This month for our science/social studies time we will be learning about our five senses. We read a non-fiction book teaching us about each sense and how we use them to explore the world God made. We then explored our senses as we listened, smelled, and watched popcorn popping. We used the sense of touch and taste as we got to enjoy eating some popcorn for a snack! Your children loved this! 

Up in Lights: We chatted as a class and agreed upon a fair way to determine the order of our up in lights friends. This is our special student of the week. We decided that it would be fair if I pulled out popsicle sticks (without peeking!) to pick the order. I will create a schedule using the order from our discussion and send it to you this week. When it is your child’s turn I’ll send our special bag and giraffe home with your child as well as the papers to fill out. Please visit our “other resources” page on our blog to see the English translation of these papers. 

Afternoons: This week in the afternoon in addition to rest, play, art, and recess we made a September calendar (I promise to finish it earlier next month!) and enjoyed some math centers. On Friday we sang with our kindergarten friends again. It was a full week!


The Tulipanes Latino Art and Film Festival will be celebrated in Holland September 21-24. If you are interested in engaging your children in the Latina culture of Holland, check out this link for more information. http://laup.org/2017/03/24/tulipanes/

Newsletter 2: Week of September 10

Week Overview

We have completed 7 days of Kindergarten! God is good! Thank you for all that you are doing to help us start this school year off well! I am speaking almost 100% Spanish with the only exceptions being to explain new routines or give important reminders about routines. I am thrilled with the amount of Spanish your children are comprehending and many of them are bravely speaking Spanish to me already! Watching your children as they form beautiful friendships and learn more each day about how to do school together brings me so much joy! At the end of the day on Friday every Kindergartener at school met together in the music room to sing praises to Jesus. We sang “Oh How He Loves You and Me” to continue reflecting on our school theme- Inmersos En Su Amor/Lost in Love. We also sang Jesus Loves Me in English, Spanish, and Mandarin- beautiful! We are looking forward to worshipping together this way each Friday afternoon. If your child was at school Friday afternoon, ask them about this special time. Once a month we’ll move to the media center and the 1st-5th graders will join us in singing.


Important Dates

September 21/October 10: TRIP Registration Meeting

September 26: Field trip to DeGraaf Nature Center

October 19-20: CEA Convention (No School)


Reminders

  • The kids have been doing an amazing job knowing how they are getting home from school! Continuing to review this with your child goes a long way in making them feel comfortable at school. I will continue walking students to the bus until they are comfortable finding their buses by themselves. Even then, I will walk them to the outside doors. Even if I haven’t come back to the classroom yet, you are welcome to come on in and pick up your child. I wish I could be in 2 places at once! As a school we are asking that everyone please wait for the buses to leave before attempting to dash across Central Ave. in front of the bus line. Thanks for helping us keep everyone on time and safe!
  • This week we’ll visit the library for the 1st time at school! The kids may check out a book for 2 weeks but will only be allowed to have 1 book at home at a time. In other words, if your child would like to check out a new book, please help him/her remember to bring the “old” book back to school on Monday! I’ll have a red bin in our classroom to collect the books in.
  • If you haven’t already done so, please turn in our class permission slip and activity fee. If you have multiple kids at ZCS you may write 1 check. Please turn in the permission slip to me and the activity fee to the office.
  • Please feel free to send a water bottle to school with your child. Hydrated brains help us learn and a shorter line at the drinking fountain means we get to head back to learning that much sooner.
  • Thank you for continuing to check the red alert folders. Sometimes they will be empty. This doesn’t mean your child wasn’t learning that day. 🙂 Often we spend our learning time in centers focused around hands-on learning that doesn’t include worksheets.
  • If you would like to order hot lunch for your child please check out the September menu here make sure there is money in your account. Please talk to your child about their hot lunch choice before school. The kids have been doing an awesome job going through the hot lunch line with me!

Curriculum

Bible: God’s creation is amazing! We have learned about the good things God created on days 1-4. Each time we learn about a day of creation I pull out a surprise from the mystery bag that represents what God created on that day. After the lesson, the kids create a new page for their creation book. I love the way slowly going through the creation week in this way helps us focus on our creative God.

Literacy: Our literacy block is taught through The Daily 5. Right now we are building stamina in the 1st of the Daily 5, Read to Self. The kids are working on reading the whole time, staying in 1 spot, and reading quietly. Try asking your child to model how we do these things for you. In our first round we read for 2 minutes! We are graphing our reading stamina together. For more information on The Daily 5, please see the document under the “More Resources” tab.

Our vocabulary words below come from our mentor text, a book that I read out loud and use to focus on different reading strategies.

  • Reading strategy: Determining importance of text
  • Read aloud: Bienvenidos a Kindergarten
  • Vocabulary Words:
    • la oficina (office)
    • divertido (fun)
    • la enfermería (nurse)
    • especial (special)
    • el patio de recreo (playground)
  • Phrase of the week: ¿Cómo estás? Muy bien, gracias. ¿Y tu?
  • Letter of the week: What is a letter? What is a vowel? a, e, i, o, u

Book of Friends: Each kindergartener is working on a book of friends. When the project is complete they will have a page for each of the kindergarten friends in their book. Creating the pages help us focus on our different names- how many letters? vowels or consonants? etc. It also gives us an opportunity to celebrate how God made each one of us unique as we draw a picture of the friend on that page. This week we started with Jesus.  We looked at lots of different pictures of Jesus in different Bibles and the kids drew what they think Jesus might have looked like. Before drawing, we discussed how to draw people without skipping some of the most important features like eyes, hands, ears, etc. 

MathWe are working on counting up to 10 in Spanish and using different manipulatives and strategies to represent the numbers. Try asking your child to find a group of objects that matches the number you tell them. Each morning we count the days of school we’ve completed and do that number of a variety of different exercises. In the afternoons we are working through a variety of math centers that help us practice 1:1 correspondence, counting to 10, fine motor skills, and representing numbers in different ways. We work in the same centers for a little while until we have those skills mastered. Then we move on to another set of centers to continue growing as mathematicians. 


Thank you, again, for a wonderful 7 days of school! If you have any questions at all, please ask! I’m looking forward to our first full week! 

Newsletter 1: Week of September 3

Week Overview

It has been such a joy to get to know your children more this week! I see the beginnings of some wonderful friendships. Thank you for entrusting your children to me during the school day. I am so blessed to be partnering with amazing families like yours! In the beginning of each newsletter I will give some of the highlights from our week at school. I often hear from parents that their children don’t share much with them about their school day. Take a peek at this section for some of the things we’ve been up to and some ideas of what to chat about with your child. Here are a few pictures of our awesome week!


Important Dates:

Here I will always include important dates coming up. There is a calendar to the right of our home page that you might find helpful.

September 4: 1st day of hot lunch and busing.

September 26: Field trip to DeGraaf Nature Center


Reminders

In this section of our newsletter you will see announcements and reminders.

  • If you haven’t already done so, please turn in our class permission slip and activity fee. If you have multiple kids at ZCS you may write 1 check. Please turn in the permission slip to me and the activity fee to the office.
  • Please make sure to take home and check the alerta roja (red alert) every day. There won’t always be something to go home each day, but I do encourage your family to find a routine that helps you remember to check the folder daily.
  • Please feel free to send a water bottle to school with your child. Busy learning brains need lots of water! 🙂
  • Hot lunch begins Tuesday. Please review the lunch options, A or B, with your child the night before. I will read through them again and help your child sign up for the right thing in the morning.
  • I am creating a classroom directory based on the contact information you gave me when you filled out the Kindergarten Interest Inventory, (Google form.) If you do not want your information to be given to the families in our class, please let me know. If I don’t hear from you, I will add your information.
  • Notes about dismissal:
    • Busing begins Tuesday. I will do my very best to make sure each child gets where he/she needs to be on time!
    • At 3:30 dismissal, I will say goodbye to the kids waiting for their parents before I walk the bus riders outside. If you’re picking up at school and would like to leave with your child before I get back from the buses, you may.
    • At 11:50 dismissal, please do not leave unless I see you. As you may have noticed, this dismissal is a bit more chaotic as there is lots going on in the hallway during that time. 🙂

Curriculum

In this section I’ll share some of the curriculum we worked on over the past week. The first 3 days of school were light on curriculum. We focused more on getting to know each other and our classroom. Your kids are doing a great job of learning the routines, procedures, and expectations for our classroom. One day after recess they insisted I wait in the hallway because they had a “surprise” for me. When they let me step inside the room, they were all perfectly quiet, sitting on the carpet ready to learn! It made me so happy one of the kids said “my heart must have been as big as the school!”

Each morning we start our day doing devotions. This week we talked a lot about names. We learned that the name Jesus means Savior. We talked about God’s plan to send his son to die on the cross to save us from our sins. I told the kids that God thinks names are very important and that we’d try to make names important in our classroom too. Incidentally, I explained that I don’t change their names to Spanish and I’d like them to use my name, Maestra Izenbaard, instead of just “maestra.” We also learned about our first Fruit of the Spirit, love. We talked about what it means to show others we love them with words and actions. In the afternoons we spent a short time resting, worked hard in math centers, and ventured into purposeful play.

Thank you for a wonderful first 3 days with your children! I’m looking forward to our 4 day week coming up! I will be thinking about you all and praying that you have a fun and relaxing long weekend! The first day after a long weekend can be a little tough, so I’ll be praying that the transition back in goes smoothly for everyone! As always, please let me know if you have any questions and I will be happy to get back to you as soon as possible! Thank you! I’m excited to partner with you all this year!