Mark Those Calendars!
- Halloween Celebration: On Monday, October 31st, children may wear Halloween
Welcome Byron Carroll & Family!
costumes to school for a whole-kinder pod celebration day. We know they will be excited about trick-or-treating and we want to lean into that culminating energy explosion with joy and anticipation, in an effort to channel their energies! Please click HERE to sign up to help with fun activities or bring in supplies needed. Thanks!
- November Parent Gathering: Wednesday November 9th 6:30-8:30(-ish) at Bass Pro Shop. We have the hamburger or pizza buffet at and there is a full bar! I am looking forward to spending time with you and we have 14 people coming, so far!
- Field Trip #3: Thursday November 17th, Seymour Marine Lab in Santa Cruz
- Field Trip #4: Wednesday December 14, 2016. We’re taking the Light Rail to Christmas in the Park in San Jose. Also, our class has sponsored a tree to decorate! If you’d like to help us trim our tree on Tuesday November 22nd, please let Arielle know. We need HELP and…Christmas cheer! (Arielle Kurtze, Field Trip Coordinator a.kurtze@gmail.com)
- Community Snack Schedule: This week is the Coscarart Family. Please, use the snack signup genius here to sign up for a week to bring snack. Let the Snack Coordinator Kudsana (kkizaraly@yahoo.com) know if you need special accommodations. And a BIG thank you to the Rahool family who volunteered last week!
- FUTURE Parent Meeting Dates: Wednesday Nov 9th (Thanksgiving Dinner), Wednesday Dec 14th, Wednesday Jan 25th, Skipping February (short month, too many conflicts), Wednesday March 22nd, Wednesday April 26th, Wednesday May 24th, and Wednesday June 14th.
UPDATE: Protocol for pick-up on HALF-DAYS (including Wednesdays):
• I will not be there for check-out. Other teachers do not typically stay, either, because 
yard duty is responsible for children after 12:30pm. I was staying until children were used to the lunch/recess routine.
• Parents/Caregivers: You are responsible for finding your child on the playground/blacktop, if he/she has not yet come back to the silver benches. Please, return to the message board outside the classroom, near the gate, to SIGN-OUT your child on attendance list. There, he/she can grab his/her lunch.
• After care kids: After care kids will go straight to the atrium from the double doors inside the gate AFTER the 1:10pm bell.
Emergency Parent Sub Protocol:
You are responsible for finding your OWN sub. Do not expect Deepa, our classroom coordinator, to handle that. Also, parents are not allowed to pay other parents for shifts (because it’s volunteering). Instead, you may swap shifts or cover for someone else on another day. Please follow the steps, below:
- Please send an SOS email out to the class on the yahoo group, CCing me.
- After sending the email, please call through the emergency sub list, below.
- Follow up with me regarding who I can expect in your place. I plan activities based on the parent support available for each shift. Your absence can completely throw off curriculum plans. Please be responsible and respectful with your shift. Thank you!
- Jennifer Coscarart (Tuesdays 2nd shift & some Thursdays)
- Doreen Stitt (Tuesdays 2nd shift & some Thursdays)
- Akiko Fukuhara (3rd shifts) 408-614-9793
- Angela Henshall (Thursday 2nd shift)
- Christine Ging (always around Thursday morning, though I may be in Rm 12)
- Lonnell Graham (408)-836-0385
- David Ramos (408) 393-4456 (Thursdays after 1pm)
Weekly Highlights:
- Read-alouds: Children who are capable of performing read-alouds asked to read to their peers, and their renditions of the spooky Halloween collection I have were AMAZING!
- New Student: We welcomed Byron to our classroom this past Wednesday. Children were very helpful in showing him the routines of the classroom.
- Half-days/Conference Week: Children had such a fun week with the Halloween festivities gearing up! It was also lovely to meet with each of you this week to talk about your children’s progress and plans for goal-setting this year.
- Kinder Sing: This week was “Request Day” and children chose the songs we sang. It
Art: Reading aloud to inspire the artists to think for themselves and respect others’ perspectives!
was such a blast seeing all the children singing together in Halloween costumes!
- Handwriting: More practice with handwriting without tears
- Art Enrichment: Children made toilet roll spider paint prints with glitter and made fun Halloween monsters with paint, recycled cartons, and other open materials. They also had one read aloud, Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon and one spooky read-aloud (Two Yellow Eyes Shining in the Dark: Who Is It?) to get them in the mood for monstrous creations!
- Air Dry Clay Art: Children molded and painted air dry clay monsters over the course of the week. Unfortunately, many of them fell apart! We tried to put them back together, but it was tricky. Children will be able to take them home next week!
- Science Enrichment: Properties of water continued as children experimented with how to make an ice cube melt faster OR slower! Many children played around with the idea of “insulation” as they discovered the usefulness of foil, styrofoam, metal, and plastic!
- Fall Harvest Festival: Despite the rain, we dressed up in our costumes and had a blast going to the different activity and food booths that the school helped put together. We shared a tattoo booth with the TK that was very popular! Outside, there was also a pumpkin patch and children were able to pick and take home their own pumpkin! Children were very excited to freely roam this organized chaos and eventually returned back to the classroom for snack/lunch!
- Story Workshop: Children had another dress rehearsal and we post-poned our
Thank you Angela for spearheading the mounting process and materials for the projector!!!
performance due to our new student joining us. We will resume next week!
- Share Chair: If children would like to share anything, the 3rd item on our meeting agendas are usually sharing. They can bring in a book or special item from home to show. If they bring a toy, it will have to go right back into their back packs.
- Halloween Exploration: Children had some festive choices this week for exploration! Halloween Bingo with dry erase markers, Making Spider Webs and pipe cleaners spiders (they wove yarn around popsicle sticks to create spider webs and cut pipe cleaners to make little spiders), Sentence Jumble (a cut/paste, write, and draw activity to figure out a mystery halloween sentence), Dot-to-dots & Halloween riddles (figuring out the picture/alphabet key to decode the mystery halloween riddle)
adjusted so smoothly to the full day schedule and quickly acquired the stamina needed to pace themselves through the day. The children, arguably, did better than most of us adults! 🙂
Buddies: We did math activities with 4th grade buddies – measuring our height and polling their class for eye color.
The goal was for them to collaborate to create a story one building block at a time and act it out -to literally play with a well thought out idea! The first day, they were given large sheets of white butcher paper and told to ONLY focus on drawing, in LARGE scale, their setting. I just wanted to know WHERE their story would eventually take place. They had to talk to their partner about their ideas, agree on one concept, draw it together, and wrestle with the struggles of how to turn drawing mistakes into something that worked in the setting. Many kids drew their characters into the scene or had ideas of who would be in their story. This was fine, but I told them that the next day was for making the characters. The second day, children drew, in large scale, their 2-3 characters and were encouraged to add 5-10 thoughtful details (clothing, different colors, definition, hair, etc). Then, adults helped them tape the characters to popsicle sticks to make them mobile, easier to handle. Afterwards, I hung up their settings all around the room and children (mostly on their own) started immediately acting our different versions of their ideas for stories. It was amazing to see them come alive. Some even asked for a paper to write their stories down, but we were ending school for the day! They were so excited we went over our allotted time by 15 minutes. So, I told them that Friday would be their opportunity to work on the 3rd W: Plot. They would be able to create their stories, play with them, and start writing them down! Children thoroughly enjoyed this week’s story workshop and fully took on the challenge of building a story together. I was very pleased with how engaged they were and loved that even with the extra time I gave them each day, it still left them “wanting more!”
Kate's Rm 7 Kinder Class: Exploring Who We Are 1 Day at a Time! 