Reminders:

• Please continue to send in snow gear
• Please send in clean towels in a re-use bag on Mondays
• Library books are due Wednesdays
• Tuesday, February 1 is the Lunar New Year. We celebrate by wearing red and learning a little bit more about this tradition from our friends in Mandarin Immersion classrooms.
• Friday, February 4 Kindergarten Winter Olympics We will learn a little bit about the upcoming Winter Olympics by reading books, playing games and making crafts. You are welcome to dress in something that represents your favorite winter sport or country participating in the olympics. We will be learning from all of the kindergarten teachers during this hour.
• Monday, February 14 We will have the kids pass out Valentine’s in the classroom. We have 14 students in our classroom. You may have your child simply address the valentines To: my friend instead of each child’s name. 🙂

What We Have Been Learning:

Bible: We continue to learn about Jesus’ teaching. First we learned the Lord’s Prayer when we read about Jesus’ disciples asking how to pray. We have been trying to recite this in our classroom, but we also encourage students to talk to God anytime and talk to Him like a friend. We were similar to Nicodemus as he was asking Jesus what it meant to be born again. We thought about caterpillars and how we are living and when we ask Jesus into our hearts we are transformed into something beautiful-just like a caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly. We ended the week learning about Zacchaeus. This is another example of being born again. I love to point out how Jesus finds people that others have forgotten or ignored. He is our example of how to treat people!

Math: We met a ten bug this week. 🙂 She is going to show us how we add on from 10 and make teen numbers. We continue to work on adding subtracting up to ten.

Writing Workshop: We are writing our own pattern books! Your kids are choosing what to write about, what their word pattern is and sounding out the rest of the sentence. This is such hard work and they are doing great!

Phonics: We reviewed rhymes this week-listening for the ending sound in words. We also compared letters-noticing some are tall and some reach low. This is helpful as we are looking at letters as we read and automatically predict the sounds the letters represent.

Daily 5: Each group was able to read together and work on reading consonant vowel consonant words. We will have a little time Friday afternoon to listen to reading on RazKids.

Engaging God’s World: We continue to explore motion in and outside of the classroom.

From the Office:

ZCS Quarantine Learning Expectations

Reminders:

• Please continue to send in snow gear
• Please send in clean towels in a re-use bag on Mondays
• Library books are due Wednesdays
• Friday, February 4 Kindergarten Winter Olympics We will learn a little bit about the upcoming Winter Olympics by reading books, playing games and making crafts. You are welcome to dress in something that represents your favorite winter sport or country participating in the olympics. We will be learning from all of the kindergarten teachers during this hour.
• Monday, February 14 We will have the kids pass out Valentine’s in the classroom. We have 14 students in our classroom. You may have your child simply address the valentines To: my friend instead of each child’s name. 🙂

What We Have Been Learning:

Bible: We are learning more about Jesus’s early ministry. We learned about the 12 disciples leaving their jobs and following Jesus. We read about Jesus making time for children. How special it is that Jesus loves us so much!

Writing Workshop: We have been writing pattern books and I am so proud of our writers! Pattern books have the same few words at the beginning of the sentence and then the last one is different. Students are sounding out the last word in their books and it is hard work.  I love that they are trying their best. When a child asks me for help, I ask him/her to say the word slowly and then ask what sound they hear. We work through the whole world this way. At home, you can also work through a word and write it out. We are using sound spelling, so allow children to write the sounds they hear. When it takes a lot of effort, it is best to only write one or two words. It can be helpful to have word wall words on display as students can write those out while looking at them and create many different sentences.

Word Wall: we added come to our wall which now includes: a, at, and, am, come, go, here, I, is, look, like, me, see, the, this, up, we.

Handwriting: We are working on proper handwriting using the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum. We are encouraging kids to write the school way in all of their writing.

Math: We have reviewed adding and subtracting using pictures and writing out the math sentence. This week we also worked on the math test to finish up unit 2.

Phonics: We listened for vowels in the words and graphed the vowels. It was helpful to compare words with the same vowel sound.

Engaging God’s World: We extended our lesson in motion by bringing out ramps to test movement.

Reminders:

• Monday, January 17-No School, Teacher Professional Development
• Please continue to send in snow gear
• Please send in clean towels in a re-use bag on Mondays
• Library books are due Wednesdays
• Monday, February 14 We will have the kids pass out Valentine’s in the classroom. We have 14 students in our classroom. You may have your child simply address the valentines To: my friend instead of each child’s name. 🙂

What We Have Been Learning:

Bible: After reviewing the story of Christmas and remembering Jesus’ cousin John, we read the story of Jesus being baptized. This happened before Jesus began his major moments of ministry in the New Testament. Once again, it is amazing to see God’s work in the details. Now is a good time to reflect on baptisms that have taken place in your families and churches and have connecting conversations with your kindergartner.

Daily 5: We cleaned out all of our old books and chose new ones for reading. I took this picture to show the large number of books the kids have already read this year. We will go through many many more!

Word Wall: this was added to a, at, and, am, go, here, I, is, look, like, me, see, the, up, we

Phonics: We listened for beginning and ending sounds in words.

Science: We are learning about motion. We started our study by going sledding! When we came inside we drew plans for constructing ramps in our classroom and then built them. We experimented putting different things down and compared how items slid down.