Little Vikings

As I ran for the safety of the gym restroom last Wednesday during a rousing game of "Lava Monster" I heard a student exclaim "I didn't know teachers could get sick!" Yes, we can all get sick! Thank you so much to all of you for your well wishes, I am feeling much better and have already been to school to double disinfect our whole room so we can all get back to business! I really missed your kiddos and am excited for school to resume on Tuesday. Thank goodness we have our Amazing Miss Kelli! She and our friend Mrs. Clinton made sure your students didn't miss a beat.

We will continue our unit on "Forests in the Pacific Northwest" through January. We are finishing up animals of prey this week and then start on predators! Students are learning about PNW native forest animals' habits and habitats and then doing a fun art project on some. We continue to learn about the trees' roles in our Earth and food chains of the forest. This week we will also do a writing activity with the students about what happened to them walking in the forest one day! We really love it when they explore their imaginations for creative writing, the results are always so fun.

We are back in ordinary time on our liturgical calendar so we are back to our 5 minute children's devotionals. We finished the series on the old testament and are now working on God's Family.This series uses stories of animals to show how God wants us to behave towards our fellow man. The children really enjoy the stories and sharing after.

We will finish our work on the letter G and move onto H this week. Please keep asking your students to identify things that start with these letters. Enabling the help of older siblings works wonders too! We continue to work on building and recognizing patterns. The kids really have a knack for it. Patterns are also a great way to reinforce recognition skills of colors, shapes, letters etc. I always tell the students their "homework" is to share their patterns with you so ask them!

I felt bad being out last week and not being able to do my planned Martin Luther King Jr. activities with your students. We will do them this week! Martin's msg. is important any day of the year and I am excited to share some facts about this great man and his accomplishments with them.