February 3

Upcoming Dates/ Reminders:

• We are getting low on Clorox wipes.  If you are able to buy some for our classroom, I would greatly appreciate it!  We have been pretty healthy in our room and I think cleaning the desks everyday helps.
• Hemlock Crossings: On February 15 we will be going on a field trip to Hemlock Crossings in West Olive.  We will be learning about animal adaptations, becoming skull detectives, and snowshoeing.  We will be leaving first thing in the morning and returning around 1:00. Chris DeZwaan an I are both able to take 2 volunteers with us, however you will need to carpool since we don't have enough room on the bus for all of the parents.  Volunteers can meet at school that morning to ride together and follow the bus.  Please email me at lstielstra@hollandchristian.org if you care to come along.  Make sure your child is dressed for the weather and has a bag lunch that day.  
• Crayfish:  Care for a new pet?!?  Every child in the classroom wants the crayfish, but I have told them they need parent permission.  :)  If you are interested in taking these creatures, let me know!
• Reading Minutes are due Monday.
• We began Psalm 121 and will practice it in class for the next few weeks.  It is due on February 17.  
• Wacky Wednesdays have been a huge hit!  February 8 will be pajama day.
• Valentine's day- I plan on having a small party with the kids on February 14.  A class list of names came home so your child can give a valentine to everyone in the class.  Thank you to Sara Wieringa and Jamie Dannenberg for providing the snack for our class.
• Makers Week Supplies
  Do you have any old toasters, phones or small appliances hanging around the house? We are in the middle of preparations for Makers Week and we are looking forward to another "Take Apart" session! We need your old and/or broken small appliances in order for us to take them apart and create something new!  Please drop these off at the Front Office. 

Curriculum Highlights:

Devotions:  Thank you to Ryan for leading devotions this week.

Wacky Wednesdays:  As you can see, we had some creativity with wacky hair day!

Literacy:  We have been exploring different text features this week.  We focused on cause and effect, sequential order with flowcharts and timelines, and comparison charts.  All of our work was done with a partner as we read articles and figured out what text feature to use in our note taking.

Math: We focused on creating new groups this week as we added multi digit numbers.  We have moved into story problems and reading graphs as we add.  We also began subtracting multi digit numbers and next week we will move into subtracting across zeros.

Science: This week we took all of our information on our beetles and crayfish and created a popplet on our ipads.  This has been a big project as we organize our information and place it into the correct subheadings.

Bible: We have moved into the book of Exodus.  We saw how God uses people who we would least expect to do great things for Him.  We saw how God protected Moses as a baby and how he called him to free the Israelites from slavery.  We talked about Moses' heart and how he was not very willing to listen to God's call but rather had a lot of excuses.  We talked about times in life where we may act the same way, and yet God is calling us to great things!

Blessings to you!

Lynae