Happy New Year!
I hope that this letter finds you rested and relaxed after the holiday season. My prayer is that you all enjoyed some wonderful time with your family and friends as you celebrated Christmas. It was a great time in the Arnold house but we are all ready for a normal schedule again! It seems like yesterday we had our last day of school but it has already been two weeks! We had such a great week before Christmas including our chapel which was enjoyed by everyone! Also thanks again to Kristin Tubergan and all who helped and donated to make our Christmas party a success! It was so fun to watch the kids enjoying the celebration! Thank you too to the large number of parents who came to cheer us on at the Jingle Jog. What a great way to raise money for our sister school in the Philippines! Now get ready 2019, here we come!
Important Dates:
- January 18: End of the semester
- January 21: In service day for teachers, NO SCHOOL for students
- January 28: Gymnastics trip to For the Kidz
A Few Additional Reminders:
Thursday Afternoons-On January 10 all students will begin to attend on Thursday afternoons. If you want to add any additional afternoons please let me know at this time! I am looking forward to having two afternoons with the entire class!
New incentive-After finishing filling our bucket of bears and having our pajama day we are now starting a new behavioral incentive! I have decided that we will be putting 25 “bugs” in a jar, since often our picnics are invaded by little creatures! J Once we reach 25 bugs (we already have 5) I will be bringing in some big blankets and some picnic food on top of whatever your child eats for lunch! It will be a fun and unique experience to all eat “picnic style” together!
Here is a link to a Sign up Genius for lunch helpers through May. Thank you in advance for your help!
Please continue to practice putting on Snow Clothes at home! This allows us to make the most of our time in the classroom! Thank you!
Our next Field trip is scheduled for January 28 at For the Kidz, a gymnastics center located in Wyoming, Mi. Here is a link to a Sign up Genius for volunteers for this as well. It will be a morning field trip and more details will follow soon.
Curriculum:
Bible: We finished up our unit on the birth of Jesus, one of my favorites as well as the students, and now moving to Jesus’ ministry here on earth.
Word Wall Word: here
Daily 5: I was able to meet with most of the students this week and hand out some new books. My goal is to be able to meet with each student twice a week as we will now all be here on both Tuesday and Thursday afternoons! When you practice reading at home with your child please make sure to emphasize with them how important it is to point to the words as they say them as this will help them when the word and books begin to get harder! I’m hoping to begin assessing their knowledge of letters and sounds this week to see how far they have come!
Phonics: We learned this week about first and last words in a sentence. We made a fun list of some of our favorite foods to practice this!
Interactive Read Aloud: We read an all time favorite this week, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, by Laura Numeroff, and practiced our prediction skills!
Up in Lights: Ailie Bouwkamp was Up in Lights! Ailie’s mom, dad and sister joined us on Thursday and shared about her as well as joined her for lunch! It was fun getting to know a bit more about her! She is such a fun part of our class with her smile and fun sense of humor! Ailie we are so glad you are in our class!!!
Afternoons: This was an especially fun week because we had Christmas singing with K-5th grade with Mr. Meyer. We were also able to do some gingerbread graphing! We graphed which part of the gingerbread man we ate first. The majority of our class bit the head off first! We also enjoyed our usual play time and quiet time as well as recess, snack and art!