Parents, please note that our class Valentine’s Day begins at 2:00pm on the 14th of February. It will be here in the classroom. A list of the boys and girls in our class is coming home at the week’s end on the back of the weekly classroom newsletter. Please contact me with any questions/concerns.
Note that students must pass a Valentine out to each student in our class if they are bringing any to pass out.

While I admit these are quite late in being posted considered we’re just a tad eclipsed into the new calendar year, here are some photos I took during our class Christmas party:

And yes, the wedding went splendidly. We’re meeting with our photographer this upcoming weekend and I will likely have some edited shots I can post on here next week. Stay tuned…

Here are some shots from about an hour ago of the students singing Christmas carols in the school courtyard area. Thank you to Ms. Arndt for preparing the music for the school. It was a very enjoyable way to celebrate as a school.

This past Friday, all three first grade classes hosted THE Santa Claus as our Mystery Reader of the week:

Each December, I teach a mini social studies unit about diversity. The students read and write about the December holidays of Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Christmas. I think it’s important that the students learn that there are many different people with different traditions and customs around the world.

Today, we played the dreidel game for Hanukkah. Each student painted a dreidel made out of a recycled milk carton from lunch. Special thanks to our cafeteria staff for saving and cleaning those for us!

Mrs. Buennig’s second graders visited our class and read some reader’s theater pieces they had been practicing in class. She has several of my former first graders in her class this year and it was fun and inspiring to see how far they’ve come since the end of last year.

Our class will be starting to practice reading some Gingerbread Man reader’s theater plays in groups next week and Mrs. Buennig invited us to perform them for her class when we’re ready.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. I spent my week with family, friends, and future in-laws. I did a little shopping and a lot of football watching too!

Below are some photos of the students at our first grade Native American fair last week. During November, we studied three different tribes: the Iroquois, Sioux, and Navajo. Each student was assigned a tribe and was responsible for building a model of the dwelling that tribe lived in.

Then, after writing a fact card about his or her tribe, the students each had to individually present their project and information about their tribe to our class. In the afternoon, we also shared our work and projects with our families and other classes in our school.

Here are some photos from our field trip to Tanner’s Apple Orchard and Pumpkin Patch two weeks ago. The weather was cold but we managed to have a great, informative day with classmates, teachers, and families.

Photos are coming soon from our Tanner’s field trip. Stay tuned…

Here are some photos from Jay Banks’ STAMP Out Bullying assembly at Millikin:

S – Stay away from bullies.

T – Tell someone.

A – Avoid bad situations.

M – Make friends.

P – Project confidence.