Monday, December 8th 2008

The Magic Trains:
1.) Played two awesome games with Ms. Kathy (Speech Pathologist). We rotated two-by-two through Alphabet Lotto, which helps with letter recognition, letter sounds, and word retrieval and played Uno which requires good listening skills, multiple-step directions, color recognition and number recognition.
2.) Began work with the letter “M”. We opened our tool box and pulled out a variety of items and matched them to picture/word cards and spelled each new word. We used some of our “m” word objects throughout the day, carrying them around and incorporating them into imaginary play.
3.) Explored the concepts of inside-outside and object recognition (square, circle, and triangle) in Math class. Example: Is the blue square inside the circle or outside the circle? Is Ms. Debbie inside the school building or outside the school building? Then a “follow the directions” game was introduced to help cement the newly introduced concepts with one and two-step directions applied.

The Diener Dinosaurs:
What a marvelous Monday! Today the Diener Dinosaurs…
1.) Read a book called ‘I Am NOT Going to Get Up Today’. Then we went on a scavenger hunt for ‘F’ words and started Letter F books!
2.) Did a project with Miss Jen about cultures. We drew a picture using one color of crayon, then we drew the same picture using many beautiful colors. We talked about how the pictures with different colors were much more interesting to look at and then talked about how other cultures are different and interesting, too!
3.) Made Diener School Passports! We are going to use these passports to ‘visit’ and learn about different cultures throughout the week.

The Mighty Dieners:
1.) In Fitness, after our warm-ups we crab-crawled around the room, did a pattern where we had to skip than hop around the room and finally we got to go through a really fun maze Mr. Dan made! We jumped off the mini-trampoline onto a mat, crawled through the tunnel, two-feet hopped through 5 hula-hoops, sat on a scooter and slid to the next tunnel, crawled through the tunnel and ended by kicking a ball into a goal!
2.) In Math, we began our weather calendars and worked on our regular Monday Calendar Math. Our weather calendars are when each student decides what they think the weather is for the day. They cut out the weather picture and glue it to the correct day on the blank weather calendar. They will do this during the beginning of every math period. At the end of the week, we will graph the weekly weather. At the end of the month, we will graph the month’s weather.
3.) In Language Arts (full class hand-on) we finished working on our Goldilocks sequencing story!! We are almost done!

The Golden Owls:
1.) In L.A. we have begun two new books called Puppets and The Shepard and the Ferry. We are building comprehension and our use of the dictionary.
2.) In Math we cut up magazines with partners and created picture graphs. We then transformed the picture graphs into bar graphs.
3.) In Social Studies we have started learning about cultures. We have been watching a few movies on the Egyptian empire and life in Tibet.

Upcoming Dates At A Glance:
Thursday, December 11th: Ms. Kim’s Birthday! • Fitness Testing for Mr. Paul & Ms. Kate’s classes • Open House @ 10AM • Afterschool Social Club until 4PM
Friday, December 12th: School Assembly @ 9AM • Dad’s Breakfast immediately following Monday, December 15th: Karate w/Master Moon until 3:45PM • Afterschool Social Club until 4PM
Thursday, December 18th: Ms. Kathy’s Birthday! • Afterschool Social Club until 4PMMonday, December 22nd: Winter Holiday through January 2nd – See you in 2009!!