Week of January 23-27

Can you believe our K year is half over?

The time really flies when we are having fun!

For those following O'Duggan Family Time:

On Friday, Lee swung in for the night on his way to Wisconsin Dells.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE when my adult children come home!

Lee and John reading a "survivalist" book 

John is giving him pointers on how to survive in the wild.

I bought him an electric blanket.

Ha!

We had one of those crazy Saturdays where we were in 4 different places at once!

Between overtime for John, One Act plays for Maeve, errands for me, shopping for Sorcha, and play dates for Fionn we were everywhere but home!

Sunday was a PINTEREST day...

Using some of the awesome ideas found on that site we...

*devoured a 9x13 pan of French Texas Toast

*reorganized the laundry area 

*began to redo the "entry way"

*made super spicy "fire"crackers...3 TBSP of crushed red pepper!

*which we ate with crock pot chili

*stirred up 5 gallons of homemade laundry soap

*decorated for Valentines

And now for this week in K.....

Dear K Families,

What an awesome Beach Party we had last week!  Check out our blogs and websites for pics!

This week we will wrap up beach themes and begin the Chinese New Year!  Gung Hay Fat Choy!

2012 is the year of the dragon.

On Thursday we will have another K Switch-a-Roo Day with Chinese New Year projects in all three classrooms. 

Mrs. Kalmes' will teach us about pandas.  We will make a cute panda project, too.

Mrs. Pilger will show us how to paint in Chinese calligraphy. Beautiful!

Mrs. O'Duggan will cook up some Chinese noodles and we will use chopsticks to eat them!!! 

We will also have a dragon parade on Thursday afternoon as we wish "Happy New Year" to the rest of the school...

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Please help your child to dress in lucky red or dragon green on Thursday!

We will also begin Unit 5 in Reading with the letter Gg, sound for /g/, and the star word 'go'.

Math finds us bumping up the numeral recognition to 50 for this quarter.

Be looking  for a volunteer sign up sheet coming home soon for two special days...America the Beautiful and our 100th Day celebration!

Dr. Martin Luther King and Beach Party Week

We began our week with a celebration of diversity!

Here's 3 books we read on Monday.

The 1st two are obvious choices for MLK day.

The Alphabet Tree is a multifaceted learning tool...

on the surface it shows us how letters group together to form words,

how words join to make sentences...

The most important sentence they made?

"Peace on Earth, Goodwill towards ALL men!"

 

Here we are creating our own 

LAND of MANY COLORS

We had a social experiment in judging by appearances.

I offered the kids the choice of two bags.

Both had something to eat in it.

Both were approximately the same weight and size.

The only difference was the outside.

One was very sparkly and lovely.

The other was a plain brown bag.

The kids unanimously voted for the fancy bag...

Inside we found......cat food!

Oh no!

The plain bag had M&M's!

After much discussion about

"It's on the inside what matters"

We did share the candy!

3 more family projects:

Nice!

Due to our early dismissal on Thursday,

we began our Beach Party on Tuesday afternoon.

During our regular choice time we took out the beach day centers:

Bubbles!

Sand!

And WATER!

Under the sea journaling with Mrs. G

WONDERFUL WEDNESDAY

PICS...

making sailboats with Mrs. Gnadt and...

painting with bubbles:

 BEAUTIFUL!!!!

bubbles were a favorite choice time activity

 "pirate" legos were, too!

the boats turned out adorable!

Finally it was beach party day!!!!

We also had a switch-a-roo day!

Here's some pics of Mrs. Kalmes' class in our room

painting clams 

                                     

and playing....we were in Mrs. Pilger's room

playing Beach Bingo

later we went to Mrs. Kalmes' to paint rainbow fish

What a fun day!

 Some of Mrs. Pilger's kiddos

 Here's a few of our beach bunnies!

Snack...starfish! 

chocolate covered, of course!

One of our favorite beach books!

ALOHA!