We are helping some students in Guatemala to learn about Jesus. We watched a video in chapel today that showed us how our chapel money will help many of these children through a program called Lead a Child. Your child will bring home a special coin purse that was made in Guatemala. Please use this to return your child's offering in the Friday Folder. We will use this each week for the remainder of the year to help these students in Guatemala and to share the love of Jesus with them. At the end of May the special coin purse will be your child's to keep.
We are also having fun with some special dinosaur centers. At one of the tables the students are learning to draw a dinosaur they see. Then they get to have fun painting it. Another table helps them to measure and they get to pretend that they are paleontologists. They are also having fun making a book to help them imagine what kind of dinosaur they would be, where they would live, and what they would do. It also contains a new sight word "were". They have been learning about story structure and they have been planning characters, setting, and a plot as they write in their journals. In Math the students continue to practice place value and sets of ten. Today we began learning about the miracle Jesus performed when He fed 5000 people. Through His miracles He showed that He loves people, cares for their needs, and that He is God. Many in class correctly identified that He did these miracles to show His love and care, but most did not realize that in these miracles Jesus showed that He is God who has all the power.....especially the power to save us from sin. We enjoyed watching a couple of videos about this miracle to imagine what it may have been like to be there. Then we had fun singing a song to act out the story.
This week during literacy centers we will be focusing on authors and illustrators. We picked a couple of books to focus on: If You Give a Pig a Pancake and Rosie's Walk. We noticed that in one story the words tell the same story as the pictures. However in the second story the words only tell half the story. The illustrations show another story about a fox. We will continue to discuss how illustrators have a very important role to not only support the author's words, but to help tell the story as well. They help us think, anticipate, infer, comprehend, etc. The illustrations are very important to reading comprehension. In the afternoon we looked for book covers that helped us to learn about authors and illustrators. Then we went to a number of author and illustrator websites to help us learn more about them. It was fun for us to write a "Meet the Illustrator" paragraph. We may display these at our Authors' Tea. We also read a special newspaper about Mo Williams and learned what he does in the process to write and illustrate books. It was fun to watch a video about planning and writing books. As a special treat from me, those students that read all of the first and second trimester words will receive a special book by Mo Williams where they can learn to illustrate and plan stories to write like him. If your child did not master his/her words yet, keep practicing and I will retest and then give your child this special book. I plan on having these books in the Friday Folder with the report card. Our literacy centers include: sequencing If You Give a Pig a Pancake, sequencing and putting sentences together for Rosie's Walk, playing a memory match game to identify matching vowel sounds in words, playing a spinner game to practice the digraphs ch, sh, and th, and using labels to insert into sentence frames and practice the proper formation of sentences. In Math we reviewed counting by tens and we predicted how many students we would need to show 100 fingers. We found out that we needed 10 kids. Then the students made drawings of ten kids with ten fingers each to get to 100. They labeled their drawings with 10, 20, 30 ,40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100. So they learned that you need 10 sets of 10 to make 100. She wrote her own song to praise God! How awesome is that? She has the Word of God in her heart, soul, and mind. It was great for her to share it with us! Thanks so much to everyone that donated food to our food pantry today!!! It is much appreciated. What a blessing it will be for people in our community!
We had fun listening to some really special books by Mary Manz Simon entitled Through the Roof and Thank You Jesus. We also had fun walking, leaping, and praising God as we sang a song where we imagined what it must have been like to be the paralyzed man right after Jesus forgave his sins and healed him so he could also walk. Throughout the morning the students had fun researching their nonfiction topics that they chose. The kids used an organizational tool to pick out things that they wanted to highlight in their writing. Then they began writing facts that they can't wait to share. Tomorrow the kids are looking forward to presenting some of their research to the PK class. Throughout the afternoon we had fun learning about orchestra instruments. We watched and listened to some instruments online and especially liked the harp. Later in Science the students experimented with vibrations by placing rubber bands over box lids. How fun to hear the different tones and to see the rubber bands vibrate! In Math we also played "Shake, Shake, Shake" to form subtraction sentences. Please look at the photo of the food pantry cart below. For two weeks our school has been trying to collect food or paper items to help people with significant need in our community. I put this information in the upcoming events in our newsletter. Sadly, not one kindergarten student has brought even one item to help the many people in our community that come to our food pantry. I showed the kids how I could easily find something in my classroom that I could donate. Please see if you can find at least one thing to share with others. Please have your child bring this to the kindergarten classroom soon. We will be collecting items for the remainder of February through March 7. I appreciate your help. Thanks so much!
Everyone enjoyed their break off from school for a few days and we also had fun back at school today. This morning we learned how God healed a man that was paralyzed. It is important to know that Jesus healed his heart first. He forgave the man's sins. Then he healed his physical needs so that he could walk. We are so thankful that we can be sure God forgives us as well. In this miracle, Jesus showed that He is God and that He has all the power to save us.
We also learned about how God created all of creation. The students enjoyed a special book about dinosaurs. It is important to know that even though the Bible does not answer everything we would like to know about every animal, including dinosaurs, the Bible does tell us that God made all things. The Bible was given to us by God to point us to Him and show us the way to heaven. Some day we will be there and can ask God all the questions we want to ask about things like dinosaurs. We began a new set of literacy centers today. The students are surveying others to see if they think the weather is acting like a lion or a lamb. The survey was perfect for today. Another center helped the students to sequence questions and answers and then to print them in correct form. The phonemic awareness table had a game where students played a spinner and bingo game to help match short a, short e, long a, and long e vowel sounds. Kids continue to play word ladder games and change one letter to form new consonant-vowel-consonant words. They also played a dice game to form consonant-vowel-consonant games and had to determine if the word they made was real or nonsense. In Math the kids played the "Shake, shake, shake" game again to make combinations that equal 6. They also played a money game to see who could cover up the game board first with coins. If a person rolled +1 cent they placed a penny on a matching coin picture. If a person rolled -1 cent they had to remove a penny. This game also gave practice with nickels and dimes. Later in the afternoon the students learned more about American symbols through a Scholastic newspaper and a video. We learned that two years ago our nation chose the bison as its national mammal. Finally, please come see the students' silhouettes in the hall and their plans to be president some day.
We had some special visitors today that showed us a fun experiment. We watched a change from solid to gas as we saw what happens when warm water is poured on dry ice. It was fun to see some soap bubbles with it as well. We learned that the CO2 is heavier than the air in our classroom and we watched it go down. |
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