• Progress Reports Underway: I am done with assessments and have started writing
  

  Kids Bop Concert Friday Night!

  their reports! I’m more than half-way through and it’s been amazing to look back on their incredible learning journeys.  What a privilege it is to teach your children!

• June Child-led Spring Conferences: THIS WEEK! Click here for the Sign up genius for June! 
• Box City:  Remember SUNSCREEN! It’s during Conference Week this year, June 5-9th. Start collecting large cardboard boxes to bring in for your child and others! One per child has worked in the past. Please contact Christine G. for questions at cch722 (at) gmail.com.
• Last Parent Meeting: Wednesday June 14th.
  

  Rebecca’s thank you card for bringing us popsicles!

• Whole Kinder Pod Hike: Monday June 19th – We will go on a nature hike behind the school. Technically it’s a field trip, so you’ll be hearing from Arielle!
• Whole Kinder-Pod Water Exploration Celebration: Wednesday June 21, Victoria Tran (Joan’s coordinator) will email details soon.
• Community Snack Schedule:  This week is the Paiyou/Ramos 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 Wayne family for snack last week!
• ADULTS-ONLY End of the Year Party: Feel free to drop by at some point on Saturday June 24, 12-6pm at 1257 Lakeside
  Drive, Sunnyvale CA 94085. Please join me at my complex for an end of the year pool party/BBQ potluck. Sheila (Cici’s mom) has offered FREE CHILD CARE that day. Give her a call! There is also FREE parking in the garage, though I recommend carpooling. We have a grill, a pool, good music and a cabana! Feel free to bring a yummy dish or drinks and DEFINITELY a bathing suit 🙂 Adam and I
  have rented the cabana adjacent to our pool, and are looking forward to hosting you for some fun in the sun to celebrate all your hard work this year! Let’s party like it’s 1999! Click Signup genius  to RSVP!
• Kindergarten Closing Ceremonies:
  

  Join us Saturday 6/24 for our Room 7 End of The Year Pool Party!

  Friday, June 23, 11:30-1:10pm. We’ve had
  great year of goal-setting, goal striving, and goal reaching since we began our Olympic Brain & Body Goal Wall! Now, it’s almost time for the Kinder Academic Games of 2016-2017 to end 🙂 Parents, please join us in class on the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL for the Special Kindergarten Closing Ceremonies for Room 7. We’ll celebrate our accomplishments, together, parade around the school passing around “the goal torch” and have a nice lunch! More details to come.

• Enrichments/Coordinators for FIRST GRADE: Think about what enrichments orclassroom jobs you may want to take on for first grade. I would like to start making plans for curriculum with those volunteers for next year. For definitions of the roles below visit https://discoverykinderworld.wordpress.com/classroom-coordinator-info/:
  1. Classroom Coordinator- (Possibly) Christina Wayne
     

     Math: Measuring with 1 inch cubes and recoding!

  2. Field Trip Coordinator -Arielle Kurtze (taken)
  3. Class Librarian/Scholastic Coordinator –
  4. Social Events Coordinator – Jennifer Coscarart (taken)
  5. Documentation Parent – (THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT! A Weekly/Monthly job) ___________________
  6. Science – Christine Ging and _______________
  7. Cooking –  
  8. Arts & Crafts –
  9. Gardening  –

End of The Year Whole-Kinder Picnic & Baseball Games!

Weekly Highlights!

• Pod Bathrooms CLOSED: Indoor bathrooms were closed due to children’s continued misuse of them. Now, we can only use the outside bathrooms and only with an adult present.
• Box City: We continued conversations about Box City (coming up next week!)
• Fairies: A mysterious fairy friend of Luna and Esmeralda visited. His or her name was Onyx! He or she was playing hide and seek and accidentally opened the portal door not knowing what it was. She immediately knew what happened once she arrived and her friends told us how amazing our room was, so she stayed and left us a brief note 🙂
• UPDATE on Trouble in Line-Up Paradise: We were having issues traveling to and from the playground. So, we had a few meetings and came up with a line-up strategy that worked so far – the buddy system! This has worked for them and made a big difference in eliminating power struggles to be near the front, shoving, cutting, etc.  We line up the same way, every time, holding hands. The holding hands part isn’t enjoyed by all, but it’s the only way people don’t start rushing the line to get ahead.
• Community Talks: We discussed several agenda items, timed 7 minutes each.
  

  Community Talk!

  Whatever we didn’t finish, we left for the net day. Some of the topics were bugs and wishes (socio-emotional issues that came up about people not treating one another with kindness in words or actions), talking about taking better care of the materials around the room, Child Led Conferences, and Box City.

• Skill Shares: Cameron (art), Maddie S. (German language), and Sthanika (science knowledge: Evaporation vs. Condensation)
• Literacy: Writing fairy letters, writing what we’re excited to do this summer, writing the different ways we fill buckets.
• Child Read-Aloud: Sthanika
• Kids’ Extension of Filling Buckets: Quentin had an idea to take our filling buckets prisms and go around the school to fill the “whole community’s buckets!” Many
  

  Bucket Filling at D2: They filled Suzy’s bucket with hugs!

  others jumped on board with this idea and took their own exploration time to go around

• Math: We did measuring with 1 inch snap cubes and more on shapes! We made two 3D shapes this week. On the triangular prism’s faces, we wrote/drew 4 ways we could fill someone’s bucket with kind words or deeds at school. For the cone, we wrote/drew  1-2 what we were excited to do this coming summer! For two weeks now, we have discussed shapes, their characteristics, and the difference between 2D (flat – height and width) and 3D shapes (height, width and DEPTH).
• Science: We finished our LAST week of science experimenting with paper towels, color dyes, and chromatography!
• 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!
• Filling Buckets and Taking Names! We read the books Have You Filled A Bucket
  

  Triangular Based Prism: 4 Bucket filling ideas each!

  Today? and How Full Is Your Bucket? which both helped to facilitate the continuation of a conversation we started during our Community Talk about treating each other with kindness. We did an activity called BUGS & WISHES, where students said what bugged them (annoyed them) and what they wish would happen instead. MANY people had issues with friends being unkind or saying mean things.   They were so proud of their efforts to change this behavior and happily recognized bucket filling moments when they could lift someone up, telling me or another adult. They also articulated when they felt others were DIPPING into their buckets, or “dumping them.” We talked about how no one can dump it, because we’re in charge of holding onto our imaginary buckets. No one else has that power.

They had some great ideas for how to treat others!

Science: Paper Towels, Colored Dye and Chromatography!

Over the past month, the kids have had many opportunities to see diffusion/osmosis in action.  This week, we continued looking at a new example of osmosis while introducing a little bit of chromatography (separating out components within a mixture).  The kids used markers and food coloring to put designs/drops on paper towels.  They then had the option to wet the paper towel to see how the colors behaved.  Before starting, we asked the kids to state any hypotheses.

• Some of the kids wadded up their paper towel and dropped the entire wad into a
  bucket of water.  One pulled it out immediately to inspect her paper towel – “The red (dots of dye) turned pink, the blue turned purple, and the yellow is still yellow.  And the water is tan!”
• Those that left their towel in the water for a longer period of time discovered that the dots of dye disappeared.  “All the coloring went into the water so now the towel is just normal again.  But it’s a little bit colored from the water.”
• One discovered that the water turned green, while the paper towel was a pink color.  After leaving it outside for an hour, they discovered that the paper towel had turned green as well!  “It must be the sun that turned it!”
• Some kids held their towel and dipped the edge in water and discovered that the water soaked up!  “My color is also going up!”  A few enjoyed using the measuring tape to see how high the water went.
• Some enjoyed making tie-dye patterns by dripping water onto the paper towel with transfer pipettes.  “The blue and the yellow are almost touching…. look, it turned green where it touched!”

Music Video Starring Room 7!

Room 12 (first grade) has been hard at work on an ongoing project to make a music video after Henry asked to learn the moves to the Gummy Bear song.  Many of the Room 7 kids decided that they wanted to have their own music video as well, so interested kids have been spending their recess time working on this project.  Christina led the charge, recording with her phone!

Box City Discussions

We took some time for kids to share ideas for what they planned to do during Box City week.  Through these discussions, the kids worked together on creating some agreements:

• No weapons, even toy ones, allowed in any part of your booth.  One child talked about a game that required water squirt guns.  When the school-wide agreement about weapons was brought up, kids immediately started brainstorming other alternativies (“What about water balloons?”)
• Respect your surroundings and don’t break other kid’s boxes.  For the kids who were considering doing games with water in their booth, we talked about how water balloons were banned last year because students were getting neighbors’ boxes wet.  Everyone agreed that that was not being neighborly, and the kids had some interesting ideas about how to ensure that water play could be done in a positive way.
• Items sold must be homemade.  There was discussion about what it meant for something to be homemade, and kids enjoyed listing out how they were planning to create their items to be sold.
• Only healthy foods can be given away.  One child mentioned an idea of selling homemade chocolate chip cookies.  When we asked whether that was a healthy choice, most of the kids agreed that it was not, and the kids immediately started brainstorming different fruits, veggies, and snack options that would be good for the body.

Get ready to rock!

It’ll be exciting to see everyone’s ideas come to fruition next week!

Fairyopolis at Box City

The fairies have been visiting Room 7 for the past month, and the kids have enjoyed

Coming up with agreements for Fairyopolis!

writing letters to their new tiny friends, learning about different types of wildflowers, and building fairy homes out of cardboard.

After hearing Ellie Luz read last month, many other children felt inspired to read to the

Sthanika’s read-aloud!

class, too. They begged me to create a sign-up and kept asking when they would read! So, we took time to create this list, below. They chose where on the list they wanted to be (knowing the higher or lower they were meant sooner or later), but please talk with your child about when they’re scheduled to read and whether they’ll be able to prepare their book, in time. This is the list that the kids asked me to put together, because they wanted to read a book to the class themselves. If your child’s goal is to do this, but he/she’s not ready right now, I can definitely have him/her go later! For children who aren’t reading yet but volunteered, too, they could simply do a picture walk (narrating the story orally based on each picture)! The last option is perhaps they can read with a partner, taking turns, or they can read a page and I read a page. The bottom line is that I want them to take as much ownership over this activity as possible 🙂 

What type of book?

Whatever book they want! From BOB books to picture books. It’s their choice of whatever makes them feel comfortable and CONFIDENT.

List of read-aloud dates and students:

1. Ellie  3/23
2. Genevieve 3/24
   

   They loved this part!

3. Logan 3/29
4. Dominic 3/30
5. Jada 4/21
6. Claudia 4/27
7. Maddie S./Izzy 5/4 (reschedule?)
8. Nakiya 5/11
9. Pranav 5/12
10. Tyler 5/18
11. Maddie K.  5/18
12. Sthanika 6/1
13. Sadie 6/7
14. Donovan 6/8
15. Quentin 6/9
16. Oscar 6/13
17. Byron 6/14
18. Nadia 6/15
19. Cameron 6/16
20. Steele 6/20

Opted Out (Maybe Next Year!)

Henry

Nicholas

Friday Skill Sharing Schedule (9:15ish-9:50am)

Children will have an opportunity to explain, demonstrate and field question/comments

Sthanika shared her science knowledge!

on ONE (1) skill of their choice. Some have to decide WHICH SKILL because they thought of two. Those children have an (*) next to their name. They have 5-10 minutes each. You can discuss with them how they may want to show their skill, what props they might need, how they will utilize the space of our classroom safely, and help them prepare for this public speaking opportunity by rehearsing it with them. I will prepare the children to be encouraging, kind, and respectful audience members. Some children already told me what they chose as a skill. So that’s why some names already have a skill in parenthesis. If your child has not chosen a skill, yet, please help them choose and prepare before their debut! Please see the following sign-ups, this week’s in bold:

• March 31: Cici (Flexibility), Genevieve (Art)
• April 21: Byron (Karate) and Nadia (Cat’s cradle)
• April 28: Tyler (Dance moves), Ellie (Drawing), Maddie K (Gymnastics)
• May 5: Donovan (Hockey), Pranav (Art), 
• May 12:  Dominic (Basketball), Oscar (T-Ball) and Jada (Gymnastics)
• May 26: Logan (?) and Henry (Gymnastics)
• June 2: Cameron (Gymnastics), Sthanika (_________) and , Maddie S. (Gymnastics)
• June 9: Nakiya (Teaching Reading) and Nicholas (_______), Steele (Protecting)
• June 16: Quentin (Karate) and Sadie (Dance moves)

Maddie S. shared her German language skills!

 

Cameron shared her art skills!