Thursday, December 11th, 2008

The Magic Trains:
1.) Started the day by decorating Christmas trees and doing other sensory activities at the table before morning meeting.
2.) Participated in a relay race during Fitness. It was the yellow team versus the green team and each player tried to put different colored balls in the correct hoola-hoop.
3.) Sang songs sang such as “Jingle Bells” and other holiday songs in Music class with Ms. Deanna.

Homework: Please read “The Three Bears” with your child. Thanks and have a great night!

The Diener Dinosaurs:
What a terrific Thursday! Today the Diener Dinosaurs…
1.) Worked on story sequencing, matching word family and sight words, and concepts of beginning, middle, and end in Language Arts!
2.) Played snowflake bingo in math – we matched the written words to the numbers on our snowflakes!
3.) Visited France and learned about the culture there ~ we talked about French foods, the French language, and the beautiful Eiffel Tower! Then we colored French flags and our passport stamps.
4.) Had music with Miss Deanna! We sang songs about Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa and took turns playing different instruments!

The Mighty Dieners:
1.) This morning we started our Fitness testing. Mr. Dan pulled us to see how we are progressing in Fitness and find out areas that we still need to have fun working on!
2.) We learned the Mexican Hat dance! We watched a couple videos showing us the upbeat music, beautiful costumes and how they danced around a hat! After we learned to do it ourselves, we watched other dances from other cultures: China, Africa and Native Americans. At the end we compared the similarities in the dances. It was so neat when we all told which dancing we liked the most and we all liked a different dance! That is why cultures are so interesting to learn about! We decided we wanted to create our own Mighty Dieners “cultural” dance! We will work on it and let you know when we are ready to publicly perform it!!
3.) In Music, we practiced “God Bless America” for our assembly tomorrow. In Drama, we learned to march like Marines for our assembly tomorrow!
4.) Due to the rain, the girls had a fashion show during Recess and the boys loved finding Waldo in the “Where’s Waldo?” books.

The Golden Owls:
1.) In writing we are beginning revisions. We are reading our drafts while making necessary corrections and edits.
2.) For Multi-sensory we took breaks such as yoga, brain gym, and also teambuilding activities. 3.) We worked on sequencing using the book How to Make Sock Puppets. Students then followed the steps to create their very own unique Bag Puppet. We were lacking socks so brown paper bags were used as substitutes :)

Upcoming Dates At A Glance:
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 4PM
Friday, December 19th: Mr. Paul’s class trip to Benihana
Monday, December 22nd: Winter Holiday through January 2nd – See you in 2009!!