Reminders:

• Please send in clean towels (in towel bag) on Monday
• Please send in all book bags in on Monday
• Mondays we have gym. Please dress your child so he/she is ready to move 🙂
• Please send in library books by Tuesday morning
• The last day for turning in donations for His Harvest Stand Ministries is Tuesday, November 24. You may send in cereal or canned fruit and we will add it to the donation table. I love seeing it so full already.
• You may send in one shoe box and 6 toilet paper tubes with your child by December 1. We are preparing for our nativity project.
• We just heard from Zeeland Public Transportation Department that they will provide transportation for our elementary students while ZPS is doing virtual learning!
  Plan on this transportation being provided for our elementary students through Tuesday, November 24th.
  • No transportation for Middle School students.
  • No shuttle bus to/from Holland Christian High School
  • Yes transportation provided for Elementary students through Tuesday, November 24th
  • View the bus stop locations and times HERE!
  We are very grateful for the time and energy the ZPS Transportation Department put into creating these routes for us! We consider this an amazing gift from our public school partners.

  What We Are Learning:

  It has been fun to review word wall words in different ways. The class loves to point out our words in lyrics in our praise and worship music, in books they are reading and this week on the playground! We wrote our words on the back lot and jumped around reading and saying the words out loud. It was a great mask break and learning time. IMG-7414

  We continue to write lists for writing workshop. This week we made a list of our favorite candy. These are very tricky words. We learned that ch is the sound in chocolate 🙂

  In Bible we read about the ten commandments. These are rules that help us Love God and Love Others. We also learned that people tried to make an image to worship instead of God. The class made animals out of play doh and we talked about how nicely they looked, but asked if they were as special as God.

  

  In Daily 5 we continue to work on reading in guided reading groups, through listening to reading, reading to self and work on writing.

  In Math we worked with counters to represent numbers. We showed different groupings that still equal the same number.

  We enjoyed bringing out some games in afternoon play. Games are a wonderful way to still work on reading and math skills as well as following directions and playing with others.

  

  The games prepared us to play a word wall word game. Each child is coming home with a turkey word wall game. Simply find dice and small objects as game pieces then roll the dice and move to the spot. Read the word before you land. You can recreate this game with numbers or different words. Your child will have fun creating and playing!

  

  Friday afternoon we enjoyed watching a Berenstain Bears video about helping those in need. We talked about collecting food and donating toys and clothes is wonderful, but there are some people who have other needs. Someone may need a kind friend. Someone may need a person to read to them. Someone may need help playing a game or walking to the bus. We can look for different ways to help people and share God’s love.

  We had a fire drill Friday afternoon. The class is doing well practicing what to do if there is ever a fire at school.

Reminders:

• Please send in clean towels (in towel bag) on Monday
• Please send in all book bags in on Monday
• Mondays we have gym. Please dress your child so he/she is ready to move 🙂
• Please send in library books by Tuesday morning
• We just heard from Zeeland Public Transportation Department that they will provide transportation for our elementary students while ZPS is doing virtual learning! 
   
  Plan on this transportation being provided for our elementary students through Tuesday, November 24th. 
  • No transportation for Middle School students.
  • No shuttle bus to/from Holland Christian High School
  • Yes transportation provided for Elementary students through Tuesday, November 24th
  • View the bus stop locations and times HERE!
  We are very grateful for the time and energy the ZPS Transportation Department put into creating these routes for us! We consider this an amazing gift from our public school partners.

What We Have Been Learning:

I have loved working with children one on one and in small groups for guided reading. I keep having to pull out new books because I need to challenge them more. This is a good problem. 🙂 They love to read! By the time books go home, your child has read it many times.

The class has also been so excited to see how many books they have read or listened to for Raz kids. I am reminding the kids to read the books in order and continue the pattern of listen, then read on own. If your child completes one level of books, you can tap the next level to get to the next set of books.

In Math we are working on adding to 5 by starting at 5. For example, seeing a 5 group and adding two more. We count outloud 5, 6, 7. 5+2+7.  We have also been working on counting by 10s. We do this by exercising and counting.

In Phonics we continue to stretch words out and write down the letter sounds we hear. We have been listening for vowels in the middle of words.

In Writing we continue to write lists. This week we wrote a list of animals. Some students noticed that we had several posters in the classroom with animals names on them. This made the list quite accurate in spelling. Other animal names needed to be stretched and we used sound spelling. the class worked very hard!

We explored God’s world by gathering earth materials. Just like scientists, we wrote down our observations of the things we collected. The kids sketched and labeled their observations.

It was an exciting day Tuesday as we were able to go to the media center for library! The class did very well listening to Mrs. Joustra and spacing out to read the books they checked out.

Reminders:

• No School Friday, November 6
• Please send in clean towels (in towel bag) on Monday
• Please send in all book bags in on Monday
• Mondays we have gym. Please dress your child so he/she is ready to move 🙂
• Please send in library books by Tuesday morning
• Goodnight Zoom on Monday! Please join me for a zoom on Monday. I will read a book to the class and we will have fun zooming at home in our jammies! Let’s plan on 7pm-7:20pm
• In the next week, please try to send a picture or video through SeeSaw at home. We have been sending in photos and this week we tried a video. I would love your child to think of something he/she would like me to see from home. *Please remember this must be sent through the Seesaw Class app. Thank you!

What We Are Learning:

This week was so exciting as we starting borrowing books from our school leveled library. Your child will come home with a small book to read to you. There are also notes about how to help your growing reader. It is amazing to me how these children grow so quickly at this point in the year. I enjoy this time with them! I explained that you may say they are so good at reading already 🙂 And that I would give them more challenging books as the year goes on.

In Phonics we practiced stretching out a word and listening for the beginning, middle and ending sound. This is something simple you can do at home as well! We pulled picture card of CVC (consonant vowel consonant) words and stretched them out. We wrote the sounds we heard and sketched a picture to remind us of the word.

We also worked on writing lists this week. Our phonics lesson helped us stretch out the words in our list. We took our clip boards outside Wednesday to write a list of things outdoors.

The weather was perfect this week to provide many opportunities to take learning outside and have a few masks breaks during our day.

On Thursday we were inside writing lists of school items. Here is what our lists typically look like as we sound out the words. 

We enjoyed working in our pajamas on Thursday!

This week I sent home the pages from our Unit 1 of Math. I told the class to look through it at home. Pages we didn’t finish could be done at home (completely optional) or the papers could be recycled. They were happy to show you their first test 🙂