Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Good afternoon JK Families!

We are so excited for our Gingerbread Party Friday!  What a great way to end 2017!  The older kids will come to our classroom to accompany our class to Wassail that afternoon.  There they will make blankets for donations and have hot cocoa and cookies.  It's such a great experience for everyone, and allows the JK children to take part in a much larger service project than we can do alone.

They LOVED the Gingerbread hunt, as we chased those cookies all over the school based on their clues they left for us!  What a great party we had!  Thank you so much for all of your help, and all of the lovely gifts and cards!  I feel like the luckiest girl in the world, and I know Ms. Liubin and Mr. Bailey feel the same. 






























Literacy, Math, Fine Arts, Science:
We have been practicing our writing and reading strategies (like stretchy snake and chunky monkey) along with making fun gifts to take home for the holidays this week.  The children also designed ice skates and decorated them with colorful glitter and markers.  They all split into groups and read Jingle Bells, sang many versions of the song, and then completed a group collage/coloring depicting scenes from the story.  I love the collaboration of group art projects!  We have been hunting for shapes throughout the classroom and making comparisons and categorizing things according to size, color and texture.  We have been playing a math game with dice and stamps locating numbers once rolled, then writing our numbers 1-20 (or 30 depending on abilities).

As the year 2017 comes to a close, we are all seeing the independence the children have developed in their problem solving and ability to communicate successfully and kindly.  We have replaced many words with kinder words, and found better ways to express ourselves with clarity.  We have looked for ways to be helpful and caring to our friends and teachers.  The children have all grown immensely in their academics including their letter sounds and recognition, reading/decoding/awareness, shape recognition (including 3 D shapes), math skills (patterning, counting, number recognition, sorting, sequencing, simple addition and subtraction with and without manipulatives, science knowledge and vocabularies, art appreciation and skills, etc. etc.   I am extremely excited about their progress and where they are at this point in the school year.  We will continue to stretch their imaginations and build upon their foundational skills, along with (and most importantly) their character development in becoming wonderful citizens.  I have heard over and over again for 9 years now at parent teacher conferences, that as happy as parents are with the strides their children make in JK with their academics, the most important to parents is that they are kind young people.  We definitely have that in this classroom without exception.  I am so loving this class!

Lila and I will be seeing Hamilton, ice skating at Lincoln Park Zoo, dining with friends, visiting Winter Wonderfest at Navy Pier, and finding the many things Chicago has to offer through this holiday season.  She is so much fun to spend time with, so really even seeing (or watching at home) a moving and laughing through dinner are such a joy.

Have a lovely, magical, safe, meaningful, relaxing, energizing, inspiring holiday season.  See you in 2018!  If you are skating at the zoo or enjoying zoo lights in Lincoln Park, text me and we might just meet you there!  I have loved seeing some of you out and about!

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!!! 

Ms. Massey