Weekly Highlights

I am encouraging the class to do their very best to speak only in Spanish to their teachers. When we’re doing something structured, especially content-driven, they are doing really well! Please continue to encourage your child and lift them up in prayer as they journey toward being bilingual! We completed an art project to celebrate and focus our thoughts on being bilingual learners. On one side of the paper is a seed, water, sun, soil, and air representing listening, reading, speaking, writing, and thinking in Spanish respectively. On the other side is a tree. Just as the seed needs water, sun, soil, and air to grow, we need to listen, read, speak, write, and think in Spanish to grow!

The top of the poster has a pie chart representing a typical day. As you can see, most of the things we do in a day are usually in English. Only one small part of our day, school, is in Spanish. This makes Spanish special! We want to try our best to keep our classroom a special place for Spanish!

In our “I’m Finished, Now What?” center, the place where early finishers can stay busy doing purposeful learning, we started working with some STEM bins! Right now there are task cards that prompt students to create fall and Thanksgiving themed objects using the materials in the containers. One of my favorites is watching your kids make the Mayflower with play doh and toothpicks! Thank you for all of the things you donated to make these STEM bins possible!

Henry and Kai used wooden pieces to make the Mayflower.

I see a scarecrow!

Important Dates

• November 20: All school Chapel (9am)
• November 20: Friends-giving Celebration (see below)
• November 21-23: Thanksgiving Vacation
• November 30: Shoe boxes and toilet paper tubes please (See note below)

Reminders

• Thanksgiving Donations: As a school we will be supporting Parkview Home and Harvest Stand Ministries this Thanksgiving season.  Household items such as toothpaste, toothbrushes, mouthwash, shampoo, toilet paper, paper plates and cleaning supplies may be dropped off in the hallway during the next week.
• You may start hearing about the Jingle Jog. This is a fun jog Mrs. Miller has her gym classes do each year. We will have a certain day and time that are class will jog around the gym and down the halls. Families are welcome to cheer kids on. I do not know our day and time yet. Watch for more details. This fun event is to raise money for our sister school in the Philippines.
• Nativity Project: In December we will begin our nativity project. Please bring in a shoe box with your child’s name on it and at least 6 toilet paper tubes inside of it by Friday, November 30. I will be sending a SignUp genius out soon for help in class making the characters.
• Gifts of Being Grand: Many of your parents turned in their GIfts of Being Grand pages during Grandparents’ Day. If you need another copy of the form please click here. I would love these by the end of November please. Thank you for helping create a lifetime memory for your child.
• On November 20 we are going to have a friends-giving celebration together. I would love for you to send in 26 bite-sized pieces of your child’s favorite food. We’ll then sample and enjoy our classmates very favorite food together in a friends-giving feast. I welcome you to be as creative or simple as you wish. Please send the food pre-cut and ready to eat. If it’s a food that should be eaten warm, you could send it in a thermos. Thanks for helping us celebrate Thanksgiving together!

Curriculum

Bible: This week in Bible every student got the opportunity to say their memory verse for a prize/certificate. We started learning our new memory verse below. This week we also finished our unit on Joseph. We learned the ways God took care of him and, in his great plan, led Joseph to take care of his family during the famine. Now we are learning about Moses and the way God used him to lead the Israelites. We’re also talking about Peace, the Fruit of the Spirit for November. We brainstormed ways we feel God’s peace.

Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.

Proverbios 3:5-6 Confía en el Señor con todo tu corazón y no en tu propia inteligencia. Reconócelo en todo tus caminos y Él enderezará tus veredas.

Literacy: Daily 5 has been going super well! Each child has a check-in sheet. Before beginning a new round of Daily 5, everyone touches the picture that corresponds to the center they’d like to do that round and Maestra Katie or I cross off the picture as I check everyone in. It was such a joy to be able to meet with every guided reading group this week- most of them 2 times!

• Reading strategy: Making connections
• Read aloud: ¿Dónde Está Mi Osito?
• Vocabulary Words:
  • de puntillas- standing tiptoe
  • el auxilio- help
  • mimar- pamper, indulge, spoil
  • el llanto/el rugido- cry, roar
  • el bosque- woods
  • atraparse (se atraparon)- trapped
  • encoger (encogido)- shrink
• Word wall word: en (in)
• Phrase of the week: Está soleado.  (It’s sunny.) Está nublado. (It’s cloudy.)
• Letter of the week: Nn

Math: We’ve been working on numbers 6-10. We’re looking for groups of 5 and trying to think about these big numbers as “5 and some more.” For example, 9 is 5 and 4 more.

Writing Workshop: We wrote our first list this week. We brainstormed things we are grateful for. Then each kindergartener wrote their own list! Next week we’ll use these lists to make a Thanksgiving art project. We also drew Grandparents’ Day and labeled our drawing.

Exploring God’s World: We took a nature hike and found lots of Earth materials around our playground including: sand, arena, water, agua, soil, tierra, and rocks/pebbles, rocas/piedras.

Standing on the bridge where we found water! We are at the creek at the bottom of the hill.

Afternoons: We had some exciting afternoons this week! I introduced a new house we’re borrowing from Mrs. Walters. We used the house to practice labeling the rooms and the objects and people in each room. By doing so, we practiced nouns and articles. I also introduced hot crayon to the students. Using a warm electric skillet, the kids “paint” with melting crayons and make unique creations!

Up in Lights: Ava was Up in Lights this week! She introduced us to her family, including her parents and her two younger siblings, Benjamin and Caroline. At the end of her presentaiton she shared her favorite book, The Most Magnificent Thing, a great story about having a growth mind set. Ava, you are strong, funny, polite, and caring. We’re so glad you’re in our class!

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From the Immersion Program Director, Jodi Pierce

How do immersion teachers embed language instruction into content instruction? Our immersion teachers use an approach to teaching known as counterbalanced instruction. At its most basic level, this means that our teachers are continually striving to integrate linguistic instruction in the middle of the grade-level content. For example, while teaching a math lesson, an immersion teacher will be constantly aware of the linguistic focus for the week; as s/he encounters this concept in written or spoken language of the math lesson, s/he will encourage the students to notice and produce the new language structure. The teacher might read a story problem, take a half minute to point out the use of past tense in the problem and then return to the math concept. The teacher could design a partner math activity which requires the use of the past tense so that the students get practice producing it. In this way, our teachers are becoming experts at doing a dance between both content and language instruction, and our students are able to gain a stronger grasp of their new language without sacrificing content at all.