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! I am encouraged as I see your kids taking care of each other. One morning I witnessed one of the girls wiping the grass and wood chips off the knees of a friend who had fallen at recess. I pray this is only the beginning of wonderful friendships and being Jesus’ hands and feet to one another!

Important Dates

• September 28: Teacher Inservice – No School
• October 2: Picture Day for our Class
• October 17: Morning Field trip to DeGraaf Nature Center

Reminders

• On Friday, Sept. 21 ZPS has a 1/2 day, but we will still be serving ZC lunch. Here is the menu for the day.

• DeGraaf Nature Center Field Trip: We will leave school at 9:00 am and return by 11:45 AM in time for lunch and AM dismissal. Parents who sign up to drive will transport your child to the trip. If your child does NOT ride an AM bus, please plan to send in their booster seat. 
• On Tuesday we’ll visit the library again. If your child would like to check out a different book please help them remember to bring their original book back to school. Kindergarteners may check out only one book at a time.

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 a new friend, Ana, a puppet we helped look for words with Aa.

• 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 reminding them to start writing their letters at the top.

Book of Friends: We “met” a new friend this week- Alaina! 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.

Exploring God’s World: This month for our science/social studies time we will be learning about our five senses. We 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!

Writing Workshop: Our first unit of writing workshop is oral story telling. We are working on telling true stories from the paste. It has been fun to share stories as we practice being good listeners and speakers.

Afternoons: Our afternoons are a favorite time to relax a little. During rest your children stay quietly on their beach towels as they color or read. Playtime has been an amazing time to get to know each other and practice problem solving. 🙂 Math centers continue to be a fun time of day as well. This week in our centers we: practiced matching numbers to sets of the same number of apple seeds, used fine motor skills to string beads onto pipe cleaners according to the number on the pipe cleaner and clip clothespins onto cards according to the numbers represented on the cards, and cut and paste apples in order according to their size. Thursday afternoon we practiced the letter Aa and each student made a book. Friday afternoon the kids created scenes full of shapes in art class.

From the Immersion Program Director