January 25 - 29

Week 21

“Be Kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”

~Dalai Lama~

We’ve really been struggling with our kindness this week. There have been quite a few tears and rudeness towards one another. I know that we all have our days where we are in a funk and not feeling social nor in a good mood for that matter, but I think this is the first time that we’ve had to experience everyone in a funk at once. We tried to talk through these feelings and different situations. It’s so important for the kids to understand that their actions and words affect those around them. We will be engaging in more team building activities this week. Hopefully this will combat some of the negative energy that we were feeling last week.

Chase Shows us some souvenirs and pictures from DisneyLand!

Area

I am sooooo proud of the work that the kids have put into their bedroom layouts! They have really taken a liking to area and perimeter. I thought that it would be a hard concept for them to grasp but they’ve surprised me and caught on very quickly! We are continuing to practice applying what we know about area and perimeter to real life situations.

Singular to Plural…Plural to Singular

This week we also spent some time discussing singular and plural nouns and subject/verb agreement. Although this is a very important concept to understand, it is also quite fun to explore. The kids had a great time making fun of the sentences where the subject and verb did not agree. Many of them said: “it doesn’t sound right” or “that sounds silly”. I am still working on growing our kids as writers. They all have fantastic ideas for stories. However, we’ve got to make sure that they are able to take those fantastic ideas and turn them into well-written grammatically correct pieces of writing. There are many ways that you can help your child work on his or her writing. Written conversations, journal entries about their day, and asking your child to write an alternate ending for one of their favorite books is a fun way of practicing writing.  

Expert Projects

WOOOOOOW! Each month the kids present their expert projects I become more and more impressed with them. The kids really enjoy diving into their inquiries and coming up with ways to present them to the class. This month we had presentations on Korea, hermit crabs, teenage mutant ninja turtles, kittens, and Lamborghinis. The kids are as excited to view the other students’ expert projects, as they are to present their own. I’m looking forward to next month’s expert projects, as I’m sure they will be even more magnificent than this month’s.

Book Buddies with Juni and Opi 

This week with out book buddies we let Juni and Opi out to be with the kids and their book buddies. After the kids had a chance to observe them, we sent them off to have some written conversations about what they saw, any questions they had, and what they were thinking.