Happy New Year

Before Winter Break, we had time for some very special activities. One of my favorite times is when we buddy read with the Beacon class. The children are paired with an older child and they take turns reading to each other. This is a valuable activity for all of our readers, the younger children gain confidence reading to the older children and the older kids love being in the role of teacher. You can just feel the excitement and happy energy in the room as the children read as many books as they can in the amount of time we have.

We were also lucky to have several parents join us for a holiday party. The children decorated treats and enjoyed every messy bite! They had a wonderful time! Thanks to our volunteers who either came to the party or who donated treats. We appreciate all of you.

The Superstars as musical stars!

We had our first public performance as Superstars this past week. The children did an excellent job with the Winter Program. They looked adorable!

We had another interesting teachable moment this past week. One of our kids was out with a cold last week and had missed several days of school. When the kids heard that I was gathering some work to send home for this child, they jumped into action! They drew pictures and used inventive spelling to send good wishes to our friend. It was the perfect opportunity to encourage creativity and working together to make something they thought would make their friend feel better. It was fascinating to watch this in motion. This empathy for one another is one of the reasons we enjoy working with this age group.

The Superstars are learning how the winter holidays are celebrated in different parts of the world. So far we have traveled to England and France. We have stops planned for Sweden, Mexico, Germany, Italy and the United States. We will also spend some time on Hanukkah. We are learning about the traditional foods and holiday customs. We have made sausage rolls, spiced cider and decorated yule logs. We're looking forward to more treats!

We are so lucky to have the older kids next door, Ms. Head's class has been so helpful with the Superstars. They have joined us in the computer lab, helped us with our unlucky fish tank and now they have been helping us with subtraction. It's a valuable partnership that benefits both classes. The older kids like being helpful and the little ones really benefit from the one on one help.

Don't forget the Winter Program on Tuesday evening, it's going to be fun!

Happy Thanksgiving

The Superstars wish you a Happy Thanksgiving! We've been counting our blessings in our class. The children tell us they are thankful for their families and friends and even Seabury. One also mentioned she was thankful for electricity! Helene and I count you and your children among the things we are thankful for. We have been busy preparing for our Thanksgiving feast and learning about the 1st Thanksgiving. We have been enjoying the boxes of Pioneer and NW Indian artifacts that we rented from the Burke Museum at the University of Washington. It was a great opportunity to handle some real tools that had been used in the late 1800's. We appreciate being able to access such great resources.

A couple of weeks ago at our Veterans' Day gathering, we had a Seabury parent talk about his time in Iraq. He talked about missing his family, meeting new people and the ways he and his team were able to help in Iraq. Later that day, his son came to our class and talked about how it felt to have his Dad so far away. The kids could really understand what he was saying and many talked about how they miss their grandparents who live far away. In the Superstars we are grateful for parents who teach us new things, older students who are willing to share with the younger kids and most of all, we are thankful for a room full of loving, empathetic, articulate children.

For those of you who need some help planning your Thanksgiving dinner, the Superstars are putting together a recipe book. All of the children dictated a recipe for our book. Just to give you a preview of what's coming, here's a recipe for gravy: First you take some brown stuff and mix it with some grayish stuff and then pour it on stuff you like, it's like syrup.

We've been hard at work on our keyboarding skills, the kids are getting pretty good!

Bonus Photos!

I hadn't planned to put these on the blog but when I was looking for something else, these just made me smile! I thought you might enjoy them too. The kids with the pizza boxes are painting (and dancing) and the other children are doing some scientific exploration. I don't think anything could be better than kindergarten!

This week has been all about getting ready for Thanksgiving and the meaning and history of Thanksgiving. We have been learning about turkeys, pilgrims and Native Americans. One day this week we ground wheat to make flour and did experiments with yeast. Did you know the gas from the yeast can blow up a balloon? We enjoyed watching that and did it a few times to confirm our results. We baked cinnamon rolls (only 2 balls of dough went on the floor, the 5 second rule did not apply) and ate them for our afternoon snack. We found the best place to make the dough rise was on top of the fish tank. We read "Little Red Hen" and analyzed the story for main character, setting, plot and resolution of the problem. The kids really got into that and we have used the literacy triangle several times this week to talk about other stories we have read.

It's all about recycling and pumpkins this week

Thanks to all of our families for participating in conferences this past week. Helene and I enjoyed the opportunity of talking with each of our families and learning more about our Superstars.

Pierce County Public works visited the classroom last week and taught the children more about recycling. We are so lucky to have these resources available to us. We also spend some time studying pumpkins. We weighed them and measured them. We took out all the seeds and counted them with the help of the Navigator class. It was amazing how many seeds were in those pumpkins and how many different ways there are to count them. Some people counted by groups of ten and some used groups of five and some counted them one by one. Hard to believe this was hands on math--it seemed just like fun!