I hope you all enjoyed the long weekend with your kids. I was able to take part in a professional development day with the rest of the ZCS staff. It was a great day of learning! I also wanted to let you know how grateful I am to be teaching at Zeeland Christian school. I am so thankful that we can pray as a class. The last two weeks I am sure your child has mentioned that one of our classmates, Noelle, has been quite sick. We have prayed daily in class for her. She is making progress in the right direction and I ask that you all keep her in your prayers in the upcoming weeks! Thank you for modeling your faith in front of your children, it is so important for them as they develop into men and women of God!
Important dates:
- February 6: Field Trip to For the Kidz gymnastics (more information below)
- February 11: all school chapel
- February 13: Valentine’s Day party(more information below)
- February 15-18: No school Winter Break
Additional information:
On Friday January 31 there is NO HOT LUNCH. There is an opportunity to order a sack lunch for that day but if you would like to you need to let me know by noon on this coming Monday, January 27.
Our Field Trip is scheduled for February 6 at For the Kidz gymnastics in Wyoming MI. I sent a field trip permission slip home last week that NEEDS to be returned for your child to participate. Thank you so much for all who volunteered to drive us. We are all set with drivers! I am so looking forward to this field trip and I am sure the kids will love it! As we begin to plan for this trip I wanted to let you know that there will be NO HOT LUNCH for our class on this day as we may possibly get to school too late. Also, please send your child in comfortable clothes and make sure they are wearing socks that day ;)!
Chapel on February 11th will be held by the eighth graders with a bit of help from the kindergarteners. We will have a small part in this and you are welcome to come and watch!
February 13th will be our Valentine’s day party. It will be from approximately 10:45-11:40. When your child fills out their valentines it would be great if they brought in valentines to pass out to the entire class (16 students). You do not have to label the To: section of the valentines, but just the From:. This will make it much easier for the students to hand them out! Also these may be either homemade or purchased, whatever you prefer.
100th Day is approaching soon! It is scheduled as of now for February 13 (Yes along with our Valentine’s day party! because of that we will be combining some of our celebrations.) We will be doing lots of fun activities that day to celebrate the number 100! One thing we will be doing is dressing up like super heroes! Mr. McAboy will be dressing up like Zero the Hero that day and surprising us in our room as well! Please feel free to use anything you have at your home to make your child into a super hero, be creative and have fun! Do not stress about this as all of your children are super heroes already! We just want this to be a fun day for the kids!
Curriculum:
Bible: This week in Bible we studied the Lord’s Prayer. We went down to the prayer room at ZCS and had the opportunity to pray there as well. What a powerful moment that was to watch God work in their little lives.
Word wall word: come ( So far this year we have done: I, the, a, am, look, see, at. go, we, me, up, is, like, this and here.) We practice these often at school as it helps the transition into becoming a beginning reader easier as they are not struggling to sound these words out. Everyone should have a packet in their book bag of all of our words if you would like to practice them at home. They enjoy writing them and stamping them out as well!
Phonics: We studied vowels this week and learned about their long sound. We did some sorting of words by listening for their long vowel sound.
Daily 5: This week we continued to work in small groups with me as well as writing, word work, listening to reading, reading to self and reading to someone. We are doing a good job of deciding what we would like to work on and getting to work right away. I was also able to assess all the kids this week to see how they are developing as readers. It is fun to watch them as they grow in this area!
Math: We are looking for number patterns. When we wrote out 1+1=2, 1+2=3 and continued we saw that it was like counting up. When we began with 10-1=9 9-1=8 and continued we saw that it was like counting down. We also used pennies to count up to 10 and then looked for groups of ten in our math books.
Writing workshop: This week we continued working on creating pattern books and we will be continuing that over the next several weeks. A pattern book is a book where each page starts with a phrase such as “I like..” or “I see..”. This week we specifically worked on “finger spaces” between our words as we write as well as learning about a period at the end of a sentence.
Engaging God’s world: This week we started our unit on motion. We watched a video of kids on a playground and talked about what we observed about how they moved. We also watched a video of both a lady and a child going down a slide and knocking a stuffed animal off the end. We discussed why we thought the lady made the bear go a bit farther. We then conducted experiments with our own stuffed animals and slides to see how we could get them to move and what it would take to make them stop. This is a fun unit in which the kids are asking questions and leading some of the learning on their own. It is great for developing critical thinking!
Afternoons: This week we were able to do music, art and play as normal and Thursday afternoon we were able to do our science investigations because the whole class now stays all day on Thursday! I love that!