Welcome, Adoo!

We welcomed a new member to our class last week and farewelled another one. Adoo joined us on Monday and we are so lucky to have her join our team. She was previously living in Ghana. Please welcome her if you see her in school! We said goodbye to our close friend Dongmin on Thursday. He will be leaving Dhaka to return to Korea and then on to a new location. We are very sad to see him go but wish him all the best in his next school.

Last Tuesday we celebrated the arrival of Maahir's sister, Elina! She came to visit our classroom with a delicious cake. Everyone was so excited to meet her!

This week we will continue our math unit on time. Today we used our bodies to tell time and worked with Ms. Preeti during learning centers on writing time to the hour in two different ways (analog and digital). Thanks for helping and encouraging your child to add a comment to our blog on clocks. For future comments on our blog, please keep in mind that the settings are such that I have to "approve" all comments before they appear. When you type in your message and click "comment", nothing will immediately happen. Kindly note that unless you get an error message, everything is working fine; you simply need to wait until I see that you've added something for it to show up on the blog. This setting is for safety reasons and we appreciate your understanding.

Reminders/Notices:

• We will have a class photo taken on Thursday, January 31. Please keep this in mind if you want your child to dress in anything special.
• Home extension activities are due every Sunday. Please remind your child to bring in his/her pouch on time so that we can prepare the next week's work.
• The folders the report cards came home in must be returned to school. Kindly sign the folder (making sure to add your child's name somewhere so we know it belongs to him/her) and return it as soon as possible.
• The students love using www.raz-kids.com at home and regularly talk about it in class. We have found this program really helps with reading fluency and comprehension, so please take a look at it if you haven't already. 

Follow us on Twitter!

We are finally beginning our big debut on Twitter! Twitter is an online social networking service and we will begin using this to connect and extend our learning to the greater world. Our hope is to share our learning and to use it as a tool to seek answers. We also hope to connect with other students across the world. The only people that will be able to view our "tweets" are those that are our followers. To become a follower, set up your own account (which is free) and search for our name, which is "Kinder Kids" (@KinderKiddos). We would love if relatives and friends from around the world would follow us so we can interact.

If you have any questions about Twitter please comment on this post. We look forward expanding our learning opportunity!

**FYI - When posting comments to our blog please keep in mind that your comment(s) will not immediately appear. The settings are set so that I have to approve all comments first. This is to ensure nothing inappropriate is somehow added. Thanks for you understanding.

What clocks can you find in and around your house?

In class we have just begun learning about time and are curious about the different clocks in our world. I have encouraged students to comment on our blog about the clocks they see in and around their own houses! We will look at their responses during our morning meeting. (Parents: Please encourage your child to type in the comment box. Of course correct spelling is not required.)

A Busy Week

Last week was full of excitement as we began a new Unit of Inquiry, wrapped up our writing unit and began a new one, and participated in Fun and Games Day. I'm sure the students slept well Thursday evening after an afternoon in the sun! All pictures from Fun and Games Day have been uploaded to Photobucket so that you can view and download as you wish. Please click here to see them. Again, thank you, parents, for your amazing attendance!

We finished our writing unit "Looking Closely: Writing Like Scientists" last week by reading our books to the PreK4 classes. As a class we discussed the fact that authors write for a purpose and we looked at the purpose of our plant books, which was to teach others how to grow and take care of plants. We then agreed that a great audience to share with would be the PreK students as they may not know how to grow plants. We then emailed the teachers to ask if we could come in, and after receiving positive replies we proudly read our books.

 

  

Our new writing unit focuses on pattern books. Throughout this unit we will examine many different types of pattern books and what various authors have chosen to do to make their books enjoyable for readers. We will then write our own books to share with others.

            

Our new Unit of Inquiry is all about systems. This word was unknown to all the students so we spent the week looking at different systems and figuring out the commonalities between them. The students shared deep thinking while trying to figure out what a "system" was and we finally reached the conclusion that a system is interconnected parts that work together to accomplish something. We will spend more time studying how different systems work and then focus on systems in our own communities.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! It was exciting to welcome the students back to school after the long winter break. We heard some great stories of exciting travels and time spent with family. I hope those of you that got a break were able to enjoy it to the fullest. My husband and I traveled to India -- the highlight being our trip to the Taj Mahal. What an amazing site! We are now back into the swing of things in KG-M and it is almost as if the students weren't gone at all. It is quite impressive to see the growth kindergarteners make over the first semester, which is very evident when they return and are able to pick right back up where they left off.

One of the first things we did upon returning was to discuss new years resolutions and how we might grow as individuals this coming year. The students had such great ideas and are excited to begin working on them. You can see them all displayed in our hallway. Here are pictures of just a few:

 

We also developed new classroom and school-oriented goals to work on for the next semester. It is incredible to see the impact these goals have on the students' performance. Last year our teaching staff had a professional development day led by a man named Steven Farr who is part of the management team for Teach for America. He discussed the importance of student-created goals and although I thought this might be difficult for five and six year olds to do, I figured I would try it out. I was quite wrong in thinking this might be too difficult as my kindergarten students amazed me with their deep thinking! They were able to reflect on their own learning and behavior and create very personal, thoughtful goals. Upon focusing on these goals I noticed the students were really taking their personal development into their own hands and making changes that even I was unable to help them make through constant reinforcement. Each students' goal is person to him/her, so please take the time to ask your child what s/he decided to focus on for this semester.