Mark Those Calendars

Day 1 of Box City Economy and we were ready to ROCK!

• Progress Reports Underway: I am done with assessments and am almost done writing their reports. What a privilege it is to teach your children!
• Last Parent Meeting: Wednesday June 14th at 6:30pm
• 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!
  

  Math and Literacy intersect: 3D sight-word cuboids!

• 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 Ging 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 Paiyou/Ramos 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
  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  –

Child-Led Conferences

Weekly Highlights!

• Kinder Sing
• 2 Friday Surprises: Whole-pod exploration and indoor recess (due to rain) where we watched Disney short films with
  

  Mystery Father’s Day Presents!

  a whole-pod snack buffet.

• June Child-led Spring Conferences:  (Sign up genius) Thank you for coming!
• Art: Making Father’s Day presents using shrinky dink plastic
• 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.
• Byron’s Birthday Read-Aloud
• Child Read-Alouds: Quentin and Sadie
• Box City: Box City was an AMAZING 4 day experience of building economy and stewardship cleanup for the kids! See pictures below.
• Fairies: We found out more about Onyx!
  

  Sight Word Cuboids: What words do we know?

• Community Talks: We discussed Box City and what was going well vs. what bothered us. The middle school bandits were the main theme of conversation. Some of us had box city bucks or goods stolen.
• Skill Shares: Nakiya (French language skills), Steele (baseball), and Nicholas (running).
• Literacy/Math: Making 3D sight word cuboid shapes and writing words we know on each of the sides.
• 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
  

  Byron’s Birthday read-aloud

  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.

Whole-Pod Kinder Indoor Snack Recess:  Short films and snack buffet!

 

Box City In Action:

A BIG THANK YOU TO ALL PARENTS WHO HELPED!!!

 

Father’s Day Present Project: It’s a mystery what we made!

 

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Children’s Read-Aloud Schedule!

Donovan’s read-aloud!

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

Sadie’s read-aloud!

the 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:

Quentin’s read aloud!

1. Ellie  3/23
2. Genevieve 3/24
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)

Nakiya teaches us French!

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

Baseball: Steele demonstrates his crow hop throw!

Nicholas demonstrates his running skills!