Merry Christmas!!

Merry Christmas!  Mrs.Cooksey took these photos the other day!  Silly kiddos!  We are looking forward to sharing our Christmas chapel with the school on Wednesday, the 21st.  Please join us in the sanctuary to celebrate the newborn King, Jesus our Savior at 8:45 AM.  We are finishing up our parent gifts and enjoying the Christmas season.  Have a wonderful Christmas season!

December Happenings

There is much excitement in the air in kindergarten!  As I'm sure you can imagine, they are excited for Christmas but also for the other things we are doing in our classroom.  We have worked on our gift for you, are practicing for our Christmas chapel service, learning about our last SuperKid friend (Hot Rod), and this week we are participating in The Hour of Code.  "The Hour of Code is a global movement by Computer Science Education Week and Code.org reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries through a one-hour introduction to computer science and computer programming"  (from KhanAcademy.org).  I introduced the children to Kodable, an app that teaches coding, last week.  Yesterday, we learned about coding by getting the Gingerbread Boy/Girl safely to his/her house.  They did very well!  You'll see their coding coming home this week so be sure to ask them what all the arrows mean and they will love to tell you about the smiley face and sad face!  We will do additional coding this week using Kodable and our Gingerbread kids, too!

Snow Gear info - Children may bring snow boots and snow pants in addition to their winter coat, mittens and hats if there is enough snow to play in on the playground/parking lot.  Please have the snow boots and snow pants in a separate bag.  One of those large recyclable bags you take to the grocery store works great!

Have a great week in Jesus!  Thank you for sharing your children with me!

Onward!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break!  I was blessed to be with my family and then get some rest and Christmas decorating done!!  Now on to the next thing....

Please take note of the email I sent home last week about the Christmas chapel service we will lead, the Christmas party and gift exchange, Montclair visits, your child's gift for you and my gift to your little ones.  We have begun learning about the Christmas story and practicing our songs.  I will send home parts to be memorized for chapel (if any) later this week.  It promises to be a fun month as we celebrate the birth of our Savior Jesus!  

This picture was taken yesterday during our rest time.  So sweet and the marker still in her hand!  We were all a tired crew yesterday!  A number of them fell asleep during rest time!  

These things that have been on display in our hallway will come home today.  I hope you have time to read through the "Thankful Book".  There's a piece of paper inside for you as a family to write additional things you are thankful for.  Hopefully it will become a family keepsake that you bring out every Thanksgiving to remember this special year of your little one in kindergarten!  

Have a wonderful week in Jesus!  Thank you for sharing your children with me!!  

"Paper Free" Activities

Paper-Free Day!!

Today we are trying to do as many activities "paper free" as possible!  Here are a few things we will be using.  Be sure to check back later for more pictures!

The Turtle Hospital

What a wonderful Skype session with The Turtle Hospital we had today! We sure learned a lot of great information.   It was nice to see so many of you joining in on Periscope!  🐢

Happy Reformation Day!

We loved learning about Martin Luther last week and today.  I'm really impressed with how the children remembered the story of how Martin helped reform the thinking of God, forgiveness and grace.  We are so blessed!

We will work in Lwtterbook T this week and next.  In Math, we bought a book at my store today using our pennies!  We learned about bones and our skeleton today.  We will start talking about voting and our rights and responsibilities as citizens.  Our Montclair visit will be this week, too so we are very busy!!  Your help in getting the little to bed as early as possible the rest of this week is really appreciated!!!  

A Beautiful Fall Week!!

We were so excited to get to eat snack outside yesterday!  It's just a beautiful fall weather week!  

     I want to thank all of you for your prayers and financial support through PALS fundraisers for a wonderful trip to Michigan last week!  Being able to connect with other Lutheran Educators, share stories, ideas and experiences, to present on our full day at the nursing home and to be refreshed through encouraging speakers was so valuable to me.  It wouldn't have been possible without your support so thank you very much!!

     We are having a fun-filled week full of learning many new things.  We are learning about the plans God had for Joseph, Jacob's son, even though his brothers thought their plan would prevail. It's truly a story to show us that God's hand is in all of our lives!  Did you see our handbell choir on Periscope?! Did you see our science activity on motion/force/push/pull today?! They love to work together and I love how they can learn from each other!  We will head to Montclair on Thursday so be sure to send a cold lunch that day.  Also a story wil come home on Thursday that they'll need to read TO YOU!!!  Please sign the sheet and return it and the story on Friday.  

Have a great week in Jesus!!  

October Happenings!

Where is this year going?!  I cannot believe we are to the middle of October already.  I enjoyed visiting with all of you last week at conferences.  Thank you so much for your time, words of support and glimpses you gave me on how to help your child.  

We are learning about Jacob this week.  They are bringing the Bible story home tonight.  We will learn about Jacob's dream tomorrow.

They are very excited to bring home their first story to read to you!!  Enjoy!!  Please sign the slip and return it and the story tomorrow.  

We are practicing spelling phonetic words quite a bit now.  They are so eager to learn!

I thought you'd enjoy this picture....its from after we painted last week (today's painting was done in STEM lab).  A helper put the yellow paint away for me.  The directions were, "put the yellow paint on the shelf beside the refrigerator"!!!  I just love my job!!

Have a wonderful week!!

September 26, 2016

What beautiful weather God has given us!  The little ones were excited to be outside enjoying the fresh air and cool breezes!  I'm happy for them that they come in just a bit less sweaty than last week! Our week will be another busy one.....learning about how God blesses all families (story of Abraham, Sarah and Isaac), meeting Doc, the SuperKid and Mr.D (Delicious Doughnuts), working on solving story problems, sorting shapes by attributes, patterns and more!  We will talk about Johnny Appleseed just a bit more, Ezra will be our Scientist of the Week and Henry M. is our Star Student!  Lots of wonderful things happening!!  Have a wonderful week in Jesus!

September Fun!

Aren't these kiddos just the cutest?!  They love playing outside!  Right before this picture was taken, we had been talking in class about taking care of and enjoying God's creation so when we got outside, they were making "shelters" for animals and hunting for bugs!!  

     We will continue to learn about Noah and the flood this week.  We are learning that obedience to God is very important and that God always keeps His promises!  We met Alf the Superkids this week and are enjoying his aaaadventures!  We continue to learn about patterns, number writing and positional words (behind, in front of) as well as practicing our one-to-one number counting.  Henry L. will be the Scientist on Thursday and we are looking forward to learning from authors at the Plum Creek Literacy Festival on Friday.  It's another great week!  

September 12, 2016

We have begun another week of kindergarten and it has some new and exciting things in store for us!  We are learning about Noah and his love for God and obedience to Him.   We received letters from our pen pals and wrote them each a letter back.  Mr. G (gooey gum) and Golly, the SuperKids dog came to our classroom.  In math, we enjoyed a walk to the gym looking for circles and rectangles and we found a lot of them!  Henry M will be our Scientist this week!  We continue to learn about following directions and making friends 😀!  We look forward to visiting the grandmas and grandpas again this week as we share the love of Jesus ❤️✝!

Kindergarten with Grandma's and Grandpa's!

We had a wonderful first trip to the nursing home!!  It was nice to see so many of you joining in our Periscopes.  

Kindergarten Life!

We continue to learn more about each other and grow as a family of kindergarteners (yes, my own family refers to me as a "kindergartener"!)!!  Each day we learn academics but more than that we learn about the love and grace of Jesus as we spend 7 hours together each day.  Some days are challenging as we try to figure out how to listen to and obey teachers, how to get along with our classmates, where our pencil boxes go and how to get our folders ready to go home (and so much more!).  Each day has its challenges but so many more joys to celebrate together! Today we learned about "Exploration Boxes" (Did you see our Periscope?!?!) and how to roll dice and fill in the right line that matched the dice number.  We are enjoying math manipulative and recesses.  Life in kindergarten is great!!