Mark Those Calendars!
- November Parent Ed. Workshop: Come one, come all and explore 2-3 topics of your
Quiet Time Snack Agreements!
interest! Day care is provided, starting at 6:15 (be prompt!) Teachers and PD trainers have planned a parent education workshop series of 30-45 minute sessions for this coming Thursday November 17 6:30-8:00pm on the following topics: Reggio based learning 101, reading strategies to support children, social skills, PD playground problem-solving 101, math games, math curriculum, music and movement, quality children’s literature, and more!
- Thanksgiving Potluck: Friday November 18, 2016 at 12:00pm in the classroom. Feel free CLICK HERE to sign up for a dish on the potluck signup genius and join us this Friday!
- Field Trip #3: THIS Thursday November 17th, Seymour Marine Lab in Santa Cruz. Details on carpools to come.
- Thanksgiving Break: NO SCHOOL next week Monday-Friday, November 21-25.
- 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)
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Quiet Time Agreements
Community Snack Schedule: This week is the Fierro 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 Ramam family who volunteered last week!
- FUTURE Parent Meeting Dates: 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. - Thank you! The Thanksgiving parent dinner was so much fun and I wanted to say thank you to parents for coming. Jennifer had a fun activity of guessing how many beads were in a jar and there was even a prize! When it was time for dessert, I had a cake to say thank you to everyone for all your hard work. “Team work makes the dream work!”
THANK YOU! I wanted to show room 7 parents how grateful I am for your volunteering in the classroom and supporting me, in so many ways. Thank you, again, to those 14 who could make it! I look forward to the next time we can gather, again, and hope more can come! You all rock! 🙂
Reminder: Protocol for pick-up on 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.
Field Day
Weekly Highlights
- Math Corn: Part of our math this week was focusing on patterns and making
Quiet Time: 1-1 reading practice with students
thanksgiving corn with pipe cleaners, beads, and raffia string. Many beautiful AB, ABB, ABC, and ABCD patterns. Children even came up with “name codes” in which each bead represented a letter in their name and they repeated their name until they were done with each strand.
- Field Day: Children received their green field trip shirts and participated in field day activities to raise money, such as dancing, laser maze, dodgeball, gymnastics, running races, obstacle courses, bowling, and more!
- Voting: Many children wanted to talk about the election this week. We talked about whether kids were allowed to vote in the election and they knew they weren’t allowed until 18. However, since we couldn’t say very many facts about the candidates (since they’re 5/6) and we couldn’t have chanting or opinions-based conversations, room 7 agreed to not discuss it in our classroom. However, we did do a vote! We voted on a fun activity to do in the classroom and they chose a fun snack.
Story Workshop: Using a sequence flow map to explain idea of our invention’s story before writing it! (aka, a draft!)
We will decorate an election booth and children will design a ballot
- 1-on-1 Reading: I continued taking kids 1-on-1 to practice reading and working on sight words during Quiet Time. It’s been going well so far! I can take about 2-3 kids a day.
- Handwriting: More practice with handwriting without tears and using lined paper.
- Story Workshop: We started a new Story Workshop about the FREEZINATOR. The challenge was to build an invention that would keep ice cold for 30 minutes and even save their characters’ from a heat storm (blow dryer). Their inventions were so creative and their stories were, too!
- Phonics Talk: We continued talking about what digraphs are and brainstormed words with digraphs. (Digraphs are made of separate letter sounds that make one distinct sound when blended that doesn’t sound like either letter, really.) We looked at ch, sh, th, and wh. We also played charades and sounded out the spelling of the animals we acted out!
- P.E.
- Art Enrichment: We started our Christmas ornaments for our tree we will have in
Art: We made some Christmas ornaments for our tree!
Christmas in the Park! Next week, we’ll make Thanksgiving placemats for our feast.
- Gardening: Planting bulbs! Thanks Julie for all your hard work!
- Math- 100s Chart & Patterns: We talked about the 100s chart and examined it together this week looking at even and odd numbers. They jumped for the even numbers and clapped/jumped for the odd numbers. Then, they noticed the AB pattern for each and predicted the next even and odd numbers.
Science-The Freezinator & A Taste of Something New!
This week was made possible by the team work of Christine and Amber working with me to bring experiences into life. These ladies created such a fun week! We talked about the role of the tongue, taste buds, and how we experience food by both taste and texture. Children expressed interest in taste and we noticed that they ate certain foods when presented differently (i.e. peeled cucumbers vs. unpeeled). We did an experiment with carrots, trying them in multiple forms to see whether children disliked that food because of its taste or simply the texture in which it was presented. After trying it 9 different ways, turns out many self-proclaimed “carrot haters” actually LOVED carrot juice (including Teacher Kate!) Children watched a video about the tongue and tastebuds while eating popsicles. Then, afterwards, we took magnifying glasses and looked at each others’ tongues to better see the taste buds (which were highlighted or more pronounced by the dye from the popsicles!)
Some fun key words and facts:
- Umami (savory taste)
- We have 10,000 taste buds
- Super tasters (taste is more intense) and non-tasters (taste is blander)
- Lingual papillae (the part of the tongue with taste buds)
- The tongue is a muscle.
Students experimented with ways of making a FREEZINATOR, which was an invention to insulate ice and keep it cold for 30 minutes and able to withstand a heat storm (dryer). This was an extension of our exploration of HEAT TRANSFER from the last few weeks, using our fun skit! Children played the role of a human, heat, and an ice cube. We tried to visualize what happens when we touch an ice cube. We don’t “get cold” so much as we “lose heat” – when we transfer our heat to the ice cube it melts as a result and we shiver because we have less heat! This same principal was applied with the blow dryer transferring heat to the ice cube, resulting in it melting UNLESS they created a functional insulation invention (the freezinator!) After experimenting, children found that having more ice cubes resulted in them melting slower than just 1 or 2 cubes. So, we acted that out with the heat transfer skit to show how it takes longer for heat to transfer when there are more cubes involved. Children agreed they wanted to use more cubes next week, and many children were very proud that their invention worked so well!
The Freezinators must stand up to the evil “HEAT STORM”!
Emergency Parent Sub Protocol:
You are responsible for finding your OWN sub. Do not expect Deepa, our classroom
Math Corn: Children made patterns using pony beads and pipe cleaners.
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 offer to 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)
Kate's Rm 7 Kinder Class: Exploring Who We Are 1 Day at a Time! 