January 3, 2011 Knowing Jesus, Growing in Faith, Serving God’s Children
Dear Parents,
A Blessed New Year! I hope you all had a great time and enjoyed Jesus’ birthday. I did, but now I’m ready to get back into our regular schedule! Hopefully all the children are, too! We’re going to stay very busy! This month we have no school on Friday, the 14th, for teacher in-service, and no school on Monday, the 17th, for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
A new snack list is on the desk by the door. I’ll leave it out this week for you to choose a week that works for you, then make a new master copy and send it home in the next week’s folder. It‘s always on the website, too. Just go to Kindergarten 1, then look at the top tabs for Snack List.
We move on to “Pp” this week. We’ll have fun with visits from Pastor Schwan and Mrs. Sayles, the principal, to share their work with us! This fits well as we are beginning a class book about what they want to be when they grow up! This will be published in hard back form and available for purchase in a few weeks. See the last two year’s books on the table by our door. If you’d like to share your occupation with us, please let me know so we can schedule a time!
For show and tell let them choose one favorite Christmas present that they’d like to share. They may also bring something that begins with “p” for tomorrow. The book buddy bags are clean and ready to go again. We switched class boxes with Mrs. Graumann so they’ll have all new choices!
This week we finish our patterns unit, and then we will really work with numerals 0 through 20, as we measure, add, and count many things and record our work. Many games we’ll play this month involve more and less and comparisons. Encourage writing numbers at home, too. While they do these hands-on activities and record their work they are internalizing combinations, what one more or less is, one-to-one correspondence, and many other constants. Please send the math binders back tomorrow. It’s time for a new game.
Our themes this month are “Winter,” “Water,” and “Community Helpers.” Our art, science, and language experiences will be related to these themes. We’ll begin some fun water experiments. We’ll be making foil boats and seeing which design holds the most pennies before it sinks! This requires lots of math, too!
Our Bible lessons this week are about Jesus as a boy at the temple. We’ll learn that God gives us parents, teachers and pastors who teach God’s Word and help us learn about Jesus, who loves us and forgives our sins. Our Bible verse is Ephesians 6:1 “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” Most parents love this verse! We’ll also spend some time with the few verses in the Bible that tell us about Jesus as a baby, including meeting Simeon in the temple at 8 days, the visit of the wisemen, and the trip to Egypt.
Everyone received a spiral notebook today that will be his or her diary or journal. We’ll use it to keep track of what is happening and to put our thoughts down, too. They’ll use pictures and words, with words increasing as they are able. In Writer’s Workshop in January we really start emphasizing quantity of writing - at least a couple of stories a week. Some times quality suffers for a bit but that soon improves. At home now you can help with this tremendously. Just have your child write one thought down most nights. It could be a one line note to put in dad’s lunch or pocket, a note to a grandparent, a reminder for the fridge, or whatever! Have them stretch out the words themselves, listening for as many sounds as they can hear. Gently remind them to put space between words and end with punctuation. See if they are using lowercase letters consistently. Have high expectations! They can do this and it becomes much easier with just this few minutes of practice regularly. Thanks for your help on this.
Our class will lead chapel this next week, Wed. the 12th, at 2:15 PM. Anything that needs to be learned will be in this folder. Be sure to come if you can!
May this special New Year be busy and Christ centered for you,
Roxi