Mark Those Calendars!
- Valentine‘s Day Potluck: We will have a small Valentine’s Day potluck THIS Tuesday
Latest Challenge: Building SUPER tall structures (taller than Teacher Kate!) with magnatiles
February 14th at 12pm. See sign up genius here for more details. Children can bring in healthy RED or heart themed foods (pink counts, too, though!) and we will exchange valentines together. Please, bring valentines for everyone in the class (22). You can get the list of children’s names from the signup genius! Thanks!
- Field Trip #7: We will visit De Anza College Planetarium on Wednesday February 15th at 11:30 a.m. to see the Magic Tree House Show: Space Mission! My guess is we’ll leave for De Anza at 10:45, and we’ll be back by 1:30pm.
- Community Snack Schedule: This week is the Guiang 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 or are unable to fulfill your commitment. And a BIG thank you to the Kerbey family for snack last week!
- Board Meeting: Wednesday February 15th, 6:30 PM – 9 PM (Discovery 1, Rm 2)
- PSC Meeting: Thursday February 15 6:30 PM – 9 PM (Discovery 1, Rm 2
- President’s Week Break: No school February 20-24th. ENJOY!
- FUTURE Parent Meeting Dates: Skipping February (short month, too many conflicts), Wednesday March 22nd, Wednesday April 26th, Wednesday May 24th, and Wednesday June 14th.
- Kinder Performs for Community Sing! All families are welcome to join us on the last Fridays of each month for the sing. However, the kindergarten pod will be performing Friday April 28th for the school. Click here to see all the dates and who’s performing!
100th Day of School Celebration!
Planetarium Field Trip Carpool List
Remember their GREEN field trip shirts!
*NOTE: Please do not share this with your children, yet, as it is subject to change based on a myriad of variables. We don’t want disappointed little ones!
- Christina (Dominic’s mom) 4 kids: Dominic, Logan, Ellie, Nadia
- Kudsana (Nakiya’s mom) 2 kids: Nakiya, Oscar
- Trevor (Quentin’s dad) 4 kids: Quentin, Maddie K., Genevieve, Donovan
- Jennell (Byron’s mom) 4 kids: Byron, Steele, Henry
- Colleen (Cameron’s mom) 2 kids: Cameron, Sthanika
- Sheila (Claudia’s mom) 2 kids: Claudia, Pranav
- Amber (Jada’s mom) 4 kids: Jada, Maddie S., Nicholas, Tyler
Weekly Highlights
- NO MORE Mud Puddles! Aside from some kids coming back from both recesses
Art: Showing kids how to make Valentines multiple ways by smudging cray pas with Q-tips!
covered/caked with/bathed in mud from chest to feet (some with no change of clothing), there’s a sanitary issue. We recently found out that several of the large mud puddles children were playing in have been contaminated by dog poop. Several witnesses saw at least 5 dogs choose their spots and owners didn’t fish for the logs…So, please, tell your child that mud puddles are off limits!
- Art: Christina helped us make beautiful heart designs with cray pas and Q-tips.
- 100th Day Celebration Party: On February 7th Kindergarten celebrated the 100th day of school with a ROCKIN’ party in the kinder pod! There were many different activities to do and they enjoyed going from room to room to try them all. Thank you to all the parents who volunteered and helped make this event a possibility!!!
- 100th Day Books: Children completed 100th Day books, with each page of 10 items asking for different tasks such as stamps, smilie faces, sight words, stickers, friends’ names, and more!
- New Clean Up Agreement Cont.: I keep anything left on the floor after transitions or found after school in my office, until Friday. On Friday, I give back what I collected that week. They missed the space themed toys and huge 3×3 foot box of motorized gears. This turned out to be a very effective strategy, though, and they’re picking up much better!
- Book Clubs Started! We now have added a new club, making 10 book-clubs up and running, so far. The NEW Star Wars book club started this week! The kids are super jazzed about it and are asking to bring in related books. I said sure! 🙂
Literacy Time: Phonics/Sight Word stations!
- Story Workshop Prompt: What will you do when you’re 100 years old?
- Field Trip: We had a fun experience at the Montalvo Arts Center seeing the Chitresh Dance Company and children asked a lot of great questions after the performance!
- Science: We talked about the sense of sound withAmber on Monday.
- Just-Right Reading! Each morning, parents can help kids choose leveled books to take home and practice reading with children. Please be sure to return the books and put them in the proper bins!
- 1-on-1 Reading: From now on, I will take emerging and beginner readers (Fountas & Pinnell level A-G) 1-on-1 to practice reading and work on sight words
during Quiet Time, and both mid-range readers (H-K) and high readers (L-N, and above) will go with TK teacher Carol for guided readings group 1-2x a week. I also read 1-on-1 with children who ask during exploration, as well. - Math: Kids made their February calendars and chose from 5 differentiated options for filling in the numbers!
- Math Stations: Children played different games and practiced computation skills with subtraction and addition.
Quiet Time: Reading with a friend!
- Buddies: Buddy reading time with 4th grade!
- Phonics Word/Picture Match Game: Children loved playing this game andsounding words out. It was a challenge for a few, but really wonderful practice and fun for most!
- Fill-In-The-Blank Phonics Stamps Game: A mystery for which letter is missing. I put this out as an exploration choice and children liked it, but we will use it as a more focused literacy activity during literacy stations next week!
- Sharing: Cameron, Sadie, Dominic, and few others brought in special items they wanted to share including more lego models, as an extension of our science discussion on models.
Field Trip to Montalvo Arts Center
Post-trip photo: Rain didn’t deter us from a good time!
We saw the Chitresh Dance Company of four women who have been dancing together for over 14+ years. They performed classical Indian dancing on Thursday, February 9th. Children braved the rainy weather with excitement to see the performance. Although the performance started a bit late and wasn’t exactly what some were expecting, the kids liked it. I was impressed overall with their behavior as audience members and in asking such good questions of the dancers, during the Q&A portion. Some comments I heard were about their fast footwork, how they liked the bells they wore and how they made the dances “sound pretty” and how impressed children were with how many turns the dancers could do in a row (200+ for some of them!). The dancers explained the storytelling feature of Indian dance and relayed the stories they would dance for us.
Children found previewing the story helpful when watching and interpreting what the 
story was through their movements. I also loved this because we have a lot of ‘storytellers’ in our classroom and I wanted them to see an example of what story through movement can look like. They also called up teachers to come dance, (which was unexpected but fun!) and told the story WHILE we acted it out in dance. Children were able to join in on some dance movements, too. There was even some information about the vocabulary for dance moves and a few mathematical explanations of counting beats and turns. Children watched and tried to keep up the count, but there was some multiplication involved in being able to decipher some moves based on the number of moves per set. So, we lost count there 🙂 The field trip was mostly dancing, but there were moments when we we did notice that we were the youngest class there, because there were some parts to the show that tested the self-regulation of a few. Overall, though, it was a beautiful performance that was both captivating and culturally fascinating. The children handled themselves very well as active and respectful audience participants, so I can’t wait for next Wednesday’s field trip to see the Magic Tree House show at the Planetarium!
Science with Amber: Moving on to the next bodily sense…SOUND!
The children explored the idea of sound and pitch differentiation using musical water glasses. The experiment is outlined here. Children found that the glasses with less water had a higher pitch and glasses with more water had a lower pitch. Many children tried to play songs by tapping the glasses and enjoyed the idea of sound being affected by levels of water. Some fun facts from the website we shared were: “Did you know that sound travels about four to five times faster in water than in air? So, water is actually affecting the speed at which the sound waves are traveling and vibrating!” Fun stuff 🙂 The children will learn more about sound this month and eventually make their own didgeridoos!
Emergency Parent Sub Protocol:
We all get sick and so do our kids! 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 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 or tell me if no one has responded. 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! 