May 14, 2010

Upcoming Dates
* Thursday, May 20th: Open House in Room 8 - 5:30pm-6:30pm (TIME CHANGE)
Please plan on attending this important evening! Your child will be your tour guide and they will show you some of their work form this year in Kindergarten. We hope you can make it!

* Friday, May 21st: ALL KINDERS ATTEND AM 9:00am-12:20pm – PTO Sports Day
The PTO is organizing a sports day for all of Eaton school, and we need all kinders to come in the morning session. Students need to dress comfortably because we will be playing running games and relays. More information to come!

* Friday, May 28th: NO SCHOOL – Staff Learning Day
Teachers will be working, but you can have a nice long weekend!

* Monday, May 31st: NO SCHOOL – Memorial Day
I will be in Seattle over the weekend to attend a friend’s wedding. Hope you have a great long weekend!

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Dear Families,

Thank you to Anna (Connor’s mom), Yoshiko (Kumiko’s mom), Jon (Leah’s dad), and Lingyan (Michael’s mom) for coming with us on Thursday to the Cupertino Fire Station. We left at about 9:!5am and arrived at the station around 9:45am. The firefighters gave us a tour of their building and we saw their office, exercise room, lounge area, kitchen, sleeping area, and of course the garage with all their fire trucks! They showed us what their uniforms look like and we saw all the different types of vehicles they have. Finally, we each got to sit in the fire truck! It was perfect timing because they actually got an emergency call right as the last few students were sitting in the truck. We watched them turn on their sirens and drive away! It was very exciting!

Welcome to Sumana and her family, who joined the PM class on Tuesday! They actually moved here from Texas, so Sumana attended Kindergarten there already. She is fitting nicely into our class. Please say hello!

Here are some highlights for the week:
• Star of the Week: Risitha
(On our website under “Curriculum” and “Star of the Week.”)

• Letter of the Week: J
(You can see our computer center drawings in the “Classwork” section of our website.)

• Story of the Week: We’re Going on a Lion Hunt

• Language Arts: We learned a poem this week called, Jump or Jiggle. In this poem, we talked about how different animals move, for example, frogs jump and bugs jiggle! In our journals, we imagined ourselves as any kind of animal and explained why it would be neat to be that animal. Also in the week, we practiced our expository writing and wrote a paragraph about why we love school. We learned what a rough draft means, and how a final draft should look different. These will be displayed for Open House.

• Math: We finished another chapter in our last math unit. This week, we used pattern blocks in the shape of triangles, squares, and rectangles to make bigger shapes or outlines, similar to how tangrams work. Sometimes they can be quite a difficult puzzle to solve, but we practiced how to solve the puzzles together and how to imagine how many smaller shapes can fit inside the bigger one. We also reviewed how to make a bar graph to compare the quantity of two or more objects.

• Computer Lab: We are working very hard on our Caterpillar books. You can see a sneak peek of our Caterpillar covers by going to the “Classwork” section of our website. We even spent our computer centers working on our caterpillar books instead of illustrating J words this week because we have so much to do!

• Science: Our silkworms are changing and several of them have started to build their cocoons! In our Friday centers, we made observations of the cocoon, using our eyes only. Also this week, we planted some lima beans and pinto beans. We learned how to tell the two beans apart, and we wrapped them up in a damp cotton ball, placed instead a ziplock bag. We hope they will sprout next week! We are learning about how a bean grows into a plant. Finally, we finished our five senses book this week by writing about what we touch and taste at school.

• Social Studies: On Thursday, we went on our field trip to visit the Cupertino Fire Station! This was a perfect way to learn about our community helpers. They taught us important information about calling 911, keeping smoke detectors active, planning a meeting spot with your families in case of an emergency, how to stop drop and roll if you catch on fire, and making sure we don’t play with matches. They gave us a flyer with more tips to take home and it is in today’s folder.

• Library: We did not have our library visit this week because Mrs. Glass had to use the library for STAR make-up testing. We will be going on Monday, and it will be the last time we can check out books. We will still have one more visit after that, on May 24th, but we cannot take any books home. Therefore, we will only have one more week of library journal homework, and then we will not have to complete the journals after that.

Thank you again for helping to donate money for CEEF. It is pretty amazing that we have basically reached our goal of $3 million dollars! Wow! Thank you for all of your support and Cupertino teachers are thankful for your donations. Your children will also GREATLY benefit from the money raised this year because now they won’t be in a 30 to 1 first grade classroom!!! It will stay at 20 students to 1 teacher. Whew! =)

On Saturday, I will be dancing at a hip hop competition at the Palace of Fine Arts! Our group, Eight Count, has been invited to compete and the show is called Hip Hop 4 Hope. The organization throwing the event is AADP, which stands for Asian American Donor Program. This competition is a way for them to raise awareness and money to find more bone marrow and stem cell donors. For more information, you can go to our dance ministry’s website: www.eightcount.com Have a wonderful weekend!