September 7, 2024
Hello Families,
I wanted to share with you that we did whole class yoga again yesterday and I will likely try to make that a regular Friday thing. We began with some mindful breaths, did a sun salutation, and then practiced our belly breaths with the help from some little animal friends. The children lay down on their back and place a small stuffed animal on their belly and then gently rock their stuffie as they belly breathe in and out. Then we ended with 3 students giving us their choice of pose and we all tried it. It’s a beautiful thing to see these children moving their bodies, practicing their breathing and calming their minds.
Donations/Help:
I’m realizing I could use some more small stuffed animals (not puppets). No characters please. Also, the children mildly wipe down the yoga mats after using them but I would love a family volunteer to help with that. Ideally, once a week would be great but I will take whatever you can give at this point. Maybe two people want to share this job? It would be wiping them down with mild soap, wiping with clean water and then hanging on our railing to dry. Please let me know if you are interested.
I have a few more classroom items I am looking for so I am going to make an Amazon Wish List. Look for that soon!
Aftercare:
Let me know if there are any changes to your child’s schedule. We have moved the schedule inside to free up room on the white board so you don’t need to add it there. Only add to the white board if there is a change or a one time need.
Thank you for all you do!!!
💜 Miss Anna
September 6, 2024
Hello Families,
Thank you so much for joining me this week for our parent meeting. I loved connecting with you! No worries if you couldn’t make it. Hopefully, your child gave you the Zoo Phonics information packet. Please let me know if you have any questions about that or need a copy. The children are diving right into sound boxes and sound books so some of you should see those books coming home. Please encourage them to read the book to you again. Have you found a place to hang up those Letter Friends? More will be coming home next week! Our class is so excited about finding more words that begin with our letter friend sounds. Our cluster page was full so I encouraged them to make more lists at home if they are inspired. 3:00ers: The 3:00ers have been writing sentences from our cluster pages. They have been practicing what 3 three things a sentence needs. Maybe they can tell you? We also joined Miss Barnum’s class for some song and dance this afternoon. Always a jolly good time over there!
Feelings:
We read a book called “I’m Happy-Sad Today” that extended our conversation about how you can feel more than one feeling at once. We shared about our own experiences and how to manage mixed-up emotions.
Math:
We worked with some 10 frames (1:00ers) and some 15 frames (3:00ers) and Abby helped introduce us to that amazing math tool-the Abacus! We also started using the cubes and rods to explore measurement.
Independent Study:
If your child is going to be out of school please let the office know so that you can fill out an Independent Study form and I can gather materials to send home. This helps ensure that our school gets the funding for those absent days.
Field Trips:
Please fill out the google form to let me know what kind of car seat/booster your child will use for transportation to our field trips. This helps me know how many cars we need. Thank you to those of you who have already done this. Our first field trip is less than a month away but we can only get there if we have enough drivers. If you can drive make sure you give all of your info to Carolyn: Current Driver’s License, Current Insurance $100-$300,000, Fingerprinting (you need our VCS form).
Thank you for your support! I hope you all have a lovely weekend. Hasta Lunes.
💜 Miss Anna
September 1, 2024
Hello families,
I forgot to mention two things in the newsletter. Last Monday we had our first music class with Miss Rachel. The children practiced their belly breathing and learned about whole notes with a fun game. They enjoyed taking their knowledge of whole notes back to the classroom and outside by finding whole notes everywhere!
School Pictures are Thursday, September 5th!
💜 Miss Anna
Hello Fabulous Families,
We had another fun and busy week! The children are really getting into our routine and starting to develop new friendships. We started making our Color Poem book. I won’t give all the fun away…it’s quite a long multi-week project but eventually they will have a beautiful book full of their creativity to share with you. Maybe they can recite the poem for you? It starts with, “Red is an Apple.” We also made some beautiful art to hang in our window to represent your beautiful rays of sunshine! We made a favorite color graph and read a beautiful bilingual book that Miss Maria brought in. It is called “A Maleta Full of Treasures.” We classified healthy foods and drew our favorite healthy meal. We planted marigolds, made fairy houses, and fairy food in our fairy garden. Of course, the fairies were delighted and they showered us with jewels the next day. We also met our big buddies and played Duck, Duck, Goose with them, read stories with them and even had lunch with them! We ended our week with all-class yoga (I turned our classroom into a yoga studio today) and celebrated Adam’s birthday. Whew!! Just recapping that is exhausting, yet so exciting! Our classroom is really starting to come alive!
Letter Friends: We’ll be meeting our letter friends next Wednesday! Yay! More about that in a note home and at the parent meeting.
PARENT MEETING: NEXT TUESDAY, SEPT. 3 AT 5:30-POTLUCK-MEETING AT 6 PM- Hope to see you there! If you can’t make it, please stop in some time to take a look at what we’ve been up to and I’ll send home any handouts.
Happy 3 Day weekend everyone!
With Much Love and gratitude,
❤️ Miss Anna
August 30, 2024
Hello Fabulous Families,
We did it! We made it through a full week of school! I know it isn’t easy transitioning from summer to school. So, bravo to us all!! We had a fun week continuing our discussion of how we are alike and how we are different. We looked closer at our eye color and made an eye color graph, then read the graph. The children drew their self-portraits. Come by next week to see them on the wall! We got out into the garden to deadhead plants and pull up that pesky crabgrass. I am hoping to come over the weekend to do a bit more work in the garden but if anyone has extra time (I know that’s not easy to come by) I would love some help weeding and getting the garden ready for some fall planting. We also had our first yoga class today during centers. I turned the aftercare room into a yoga studio and we had a lovely practice together. We started with some deep breaths and warmed ourselves up with a sun salutation. Then, we had some animal friends helping us with our poses. Miss Maria brought us a wonderful book from the library called, “Skin Again” that talked about how our skin is just a covering and to get to know who someone is you have to, “come inside and open your heart way wide.” We talked about how who we are comes from our personality, our family and our culture. We’ll explore that more and coming soon will be something I will need your help with. I would love to do a short survey with families to find out about one another’s culture. We’ve been talking about ancestors and I think this would be a great way to share with each other. More details on this soon!
Next week: We have three exciting things starting next week that will be ongoing. On Mondays at 11:30 we will have Music and Movement with Miss Rachel. Yay! On Thursday we are going to meet our big buddies for the first time this year. We’re so excited!The 3:00ers will be starting an afternoon rotation with Miss Barnum, Miss Jess and myself. I’ll be teaching yoga, Miss Barnum will be doing music/dancing, and Miss Jess will be teaching the children about herbs in the garden. I’m really excited about this collaboration!
Parent Meeting: I’ll be having our class parent meeting on 9/3 at 5:30. Please let me know if you can come. We’ll do a light potluck from 5:30-6 and meet until about 7. My son, Zachary (8th grade) and my daughter, Isabella (5th grade) will be offering free child care in the aftercare room. Please do RSVP if you need childcare so they can be prepared.
Class Contact List: I am going to start a class list of contact info that will be shared for non-school things like play dates and birthday parties. Please send me a reply letting me know if you would like to be on the list and if you want to share just email, just phone number or both.
Thank you so much for all that you do to raise these bright rays of sunshine!
💜 Miss Anna
August 23, 2024
August 20, 2024
Hello Village families,
Just a quick note about pick-up time. Please connect in some way with either me or Miss Maria so we know that your child has gone home. It’s such a busy time, as you know, and we appreciate your support with this. Also, please let me know, either in an email or verbally in the morning, if your child is being picked up by someone else or being walked out to the parking lot by a sibling.
Thank you!
💜 Miss Anna
Hello Families,
It sure has been an amazing week! We’ve been having fun getting to know each other, establishing routines and protocols, talking about feelings and how they change, practicing problem solving when we have a conflict with a friend, and noticing our similarities and differences. We read a book called “The Color of Us” that celebrates diversity in a really fun way. We painted our hands to match our skin-tone and came up with some new beautiful names for our shades of brown. We’ve been practicing our sign language and Spanish at circle through poems, songs and calendar. Next week will begin full days for our First graders, who we call 3:00ers at Village since they stay until 3:15. And, you guessed it, we call the Kindergarteners, 1:00ers.
At snack and lunch time I’ve been checking in with each child to be sure they start eating their protein first. We’ve been talking about how protein helps you have energy for the day and helps your brain grow. We’ll be moving into more lessons about nutrition and healthy eating in the upcoming weeks. Thank you again for your support in packing healthy lunches.
Every Friday we end our day with an appreciation circle. Today, we tried to say an appreciation with just one word. These children have so much joy and love in their hearts. Some of their appreciations were: the earth, their friends, the school.
Birthday Celebrations:
We will celebrate birthdays in the classroom with a special birthday story that begins with some help from you. If your child has a birthday during the school year please bring in one photo from each year of their life starting with birth (or at least before they turned one). These can be brought in on the day before the celebration or the day of. Typically, these birthday story celebrations happen at either 9:00ish or 11:00ish. When your child’s birthday is approaching, I will reach out to families to see what time works for you if you are interested in joining. If you wish to bring in a special snack for that day I would like it to keep it to fruit or vegetables only, as we do have some allergies and dietary restrictions. Some ideas could be: fruit kebobs, kale chips, apple slices with cinnamon, various cut up/shredded vegetables that we could make into salad people (see me if you are curious about this one). Maybe you all have some other fun ideas?
Field Trips:
We will be going on several field trips this year and will need parent drivers. Send me an email if you are interested in driving and I can give you details about that. I am still confirming all field trip dates but will get those to you soon! Our first Luther Burbank Center for the Arts field trip is the Sewam Indian Dance Company on October 23 at 9:30.
Thank you so much for signing up for parent jobs and for helping fill our wish list. We almost have the parent job list full. You can catch me after school or send me an email if you have questions about what you’ve signed up for.
And most importantly, thank you for sharing your amazing children with us. I hope you all have a lovely weekend!
💜 Miss Anna
August 16, 2024
August 14, 2024
Hello wonderful families!
It was so great to see you all and your children today. What a great start to a fantastic year! The Spiral Dance is always so beautiful and I feel grateful to be a part of this amazing community. We had such a lovely circle this morning in our classroom learning our names with a song, meeting our class kitty, Abby the Tabby, and talking about nicknames. During centers I took the children on a school tour, they played with playdough, and drew a picture about a fun time they had this summer. Thank you all for packing beautiful lunches! I know sharing the cubbies might be a bit confusing for the children right now so please help remind them to take out their lunch and water bottle after hanging up their backpacks and to look for their name on either the top or bottom cubby.
Thank you again for all of your support!
See you in the morning for another fabulous day!
💜 Miss Anna
August 13, 2024
Hello Fabulous Families,
It was so good to see many of you on Monday for Parent Orientation, and I look forward to seeing you all and your children tomorrow. The mornings are busy with prepping for the day so please send
me an email if you have any questions and we can arrange a time to chat after school. I’m available most days after 3:15 except Wednesdays.
See you soon!
It’s going to be a great year!
💜 Miss Anna
