With this year all but over, it is with bittersweet feelings I type this last blog. Don’t get me wrong…I am all about summer vacation! I love not having to get up at 5:30 and be on such a tight schedule all day. I love having absolutely nothing that I MUST do, but the ability to do whatever I WANT to do. I love sleeping in, having coffee, actually reading the whole newspaper with no agenda for the day whatsoever. I love beach days with friends, taking naps in the afternoons and sitting and reading entire books in a day…oh yes, I love me some summer vacation…but the sad part is saying goodbye to 23 beautiful individuals with whom I have spent an enormous amount of time over the last 180 days. In truth, I’ve been with them more than you have! I have watched them grow and learn, I’ve watched them struggle. I’ve watched them cry…cry over hurt feelings, cry over not understanding something they were doing, cry over missing their mommies, and cry over getting in trouble. I’ve also watched them laugh…great big, deep belly laughs that only children can do with such authenticity. I’ve watched them smile…smile because they made a new friend, smile because they can finally do something they’ve been trying and trying to do, smile because something is fun and new, and smile because they are 5 and there is so much to smile about. I’ve watched their eyes grow big in wonder and discovery and I’ve watched them close in exhaustion at naptime after a full and tiring day of being 5! I’ve listened to the most interesting of conversations in the housekeeping center and learned a lot about what goes on in your households as they pretend to be you! (I had no idea so many of you LIKE to clean!) I’ve watched them be bossy, impatient, grumpy, and mean. I’ve also watched them be kind, empathetic, helpful and loving. My days have been filled with “Mrs. Meeuwse! Mrs. Meeuwse! a million times over until there were days I wanted to be anyone BUT Mrs. Meeuwse! but in truth, I wouldn’t trade places with anyone. What an awesome privilege it is to sit where I sit and to watch and be a part of such a fantastic transformation. My final words are well done parents and well done K-3 students! You are ready for first grade!
Enjoy your summer and come see me next year!
Take time,
Kristi
This post will be very short. I plan to do a longer post on Monday next week after we visit first grade. It’s been a short week. We’ve reviewed our favorite things in kindergarten and talked a lot about all of the things we’ve done and learned. Someone said, “Man! no wonder my brain is so full!” Indeed, their brains ARE full! Today, weather permitting, we will go on the Bobcat Prowl and the first part of next week is very busy also…first grade visits, career day and our awards and picnic! It will go by very quickly!
Enjoy your weekend! Hopefully the rain will STOP and we can enjoy some sunshine!
Take time!
Kristi
Whew…it’s been a week! In educational circles, it’s well known that highly verbal children are usually very bright. If that holds true, I have 23 genuises this week! I honestly do not know how there can be any words remaining in their little bodies since the talking and chatting has been non-stop! Some of them are even talking to themselves~not really, but it seems like it! The excitement level of summer vacation is beginning to crescendo into a true cacophony. We did take a break from the action to go out and play a game of kickball this week. They had a great time, although it took a while for a few of them to understand you don’t just pick up the ball and run around amok on the field…there is a purpose to getting the ball and getting the runner out. It was very comical to watch. They all had big smiles on their faces and afterward proclaimed it was super cool and the most fun they ever had.
We’ve had fun talking about dinosaurs this week. Next week we talk about summer and will review our year. The kids will get an opportunity to visit first grade classes the last week of school. We have field day next Wednesday and our class awards and picnic on June 3rd. If you can only do one of these, please make it to the awards day.
Whatever your plans this weekend, enjoy! I’m working Habitat for Humanity on Saturday and probably going out in the boat on Monday.
Take time,
Kristi
Have you seen our amazing rainforest display in the hall? It seems to grow and multiply every day. We have enjoyed reading and learning allabout the 4 layers of the rainforest and about some of the animals and plants that live there. We were also excited to know that the rainforest provides us the cocoa plant which also provides CHOCOLATE! We became much more interested in ways to save the rainforest after that! Their conversations this week were fun and oh so grown up sounding. There were debates about whether it was better to live in the understory with the jaguars or in the canopy with the monkeys. There was one on-going discussion between the boys about whether it is more cool to be a 3-toed sloth (because you are so slow and lazy you just sleep and hang upside down all day and you don’t have to do anything) or to be a poison arrow frog (because you get to be a cool color and… well….be poisonous).
We have had a messed-up schedule week with PASS testing and hope to be back on regular schedule next week. We move on to Dinosaurs next week…another crowd pleaser.
Whatever you do this weekend, enjoy yourself and take some time to relax and enjoy. My plans involve some house cleaning (ugh) and a 50th birthday party of a dear friend. I plan to remind her that she is waaay older than me!
Take time!
Kristi
What a wonderful week we’ve had this week! This is my favorite unit of all! We have had so much fun reading about pirates and talking like pirates. Our life-size pirates in the hall were fabulous. The children have become so detail oriented and decorated their very own pirate-selves to the nines! Many had scars, hook hands, peg legs, parrots on the shoulder, earrings, cutlasses, you name it! The conversation in the room was priceless as they decorated them too. Did you read your child’s Pirate Captain’s Log (journal) this week? They were FABULOUS!! I shared several with Mr. Cobb and he was blown away! Today, we will head down to Folly and the word on the street is that…ssshhhh….someone buried a pirate treasure down there so we will be looking to find it…the only thing is, the kids won’t know until we get there so if you are crazy enough to be up this early reading this, keep the secret or ye will be walking the plank! Aaargggh!
It’s so reassuring to know that what I am teaching actually reaches them some days…one day at lunch this week, someone had some fruit in their lunch box and as we were getting ready to leave the cafeteria, I said, “Aren’t you going to eat your fruit?” and the child said no. The child next to him leaned over, very seriously, and said, “You’d better eat that or you might get scurvy!” Bless his little pirate heart! So…there’s a new strategy if you can’t get your child to eat fruit, you can always use the “scurvy angle!”
Pirate day at the beach also signals we are so very close to the end of the year! We have 19 days remaining! Next week we begin the rainforest. The hallway is already fairly jungle-like. Throughout the week, we will be adding all kinds of rainforest animals…pythons, poison arrow frogs (this will be their absolute favorite!), monkeys, parrots, leopards etc…then dinosaurs and that’s it!
Enjoy your Mother’s Day! I enjoyed reading what the children wrote in their cards on Thursday…apparently, several of you like to clean…hmm….I’m thinking you can come to my house anytime you like! Have a fabulous weekend…stay cool! It’s going to be hot!
Take time,
Kristi
We have ended our Oceans week and are jumping into Pirates. We traced our bodies on paper and decorated them like pirates. We cut them out and they are all parading down the hallway. Next week we will make our own Jolly Roger and read several books on pirates. One of my favorites is Do Pirates Take Baths? Friday is our beach trip. Hard to believe we are down to 25 days and counting! Please mark your calendars for our end of the year picnic on Wed. June 3 at 11:00. We will have a brief awards ceremony in the classroom and then we will have a picnic. We will need everyone to bring a side dish. We will have hotdogs too. There will be more information coming out soon.
The warm weather is causing spring fever! Summer vacation is calling hard! Few things feel quite so good as leisurely mornings with no agenda. The weekend weather looks great! Enjoy your weekend!
Take time,
Kristi
Ok…even I admit the title of this post is crazy…but haven’t we all had a song that we THOUGHT we knew the lyrics to, but were mistaken? I know when I was younger, I thought the song “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise” was “There’s a Bathroom on the Right” (major apologies to Creedance Clearwater, and yes, I’m showing my age here.) Ah, I digress…so this week, we were discussing camping. We talked about sitting around the campfire and roasting marshamallows, telling ghost stories and singing camping songs. I asked if any of them knew a camping song and someone raised their hand and said, “Camp Town Ladies.” Surprised, not only because this really isn’t a camping song and more importantly, that someone this age would know this song (you know…Camp town ladies sing this song, doo dah, doo dah), I repeated them and said, “Camp Town Ladies?” and someone else said, “NO! She said TRAMP town ladies.” Thoroughtly muddled and confused, and secretly terrified someone would ask me what Tramp Town Ladies are, I did what all teachers do who don’t really know what to say at this point and I re-directed….”So, does anyone know how to make s’mores?” Subject changed, topic forgotten, life moved on…thank goodness! We have had a good time this week playing in the tent, making walkie talkies, talking about camping needs and oh, we have covered some language arts skills. We focused heavily on beginning, middle and end of stories that we read and write. The children spent 3 days working on their own beginning, middle and end of a camping story. Today, we will go on a “hike” around the back field and enjoy nature, looking for insects and someone even suggested we may see a bear. I dearly hope not, but imagination can be a wonderful thing.
Next week, we turn to the ocean and begin to learn about ocean creatures and habitats. After that, we start my favorite unit of all…Pirates. Such fun! I hope you all enjoy your weekend. The weather is supposed to be beautiful.
Take time,
Kristi
We spent this week discussing seeds and plants. We discussed parts of the seed and the plant life cycle. They are very interested in life cycles lately. They were simultaneously disgusted and thrilled to find out that when animals eat seeds in plants, the seeds “pass through” the animals and then grow where they are “dropped.” In discussing the life cycle of sunflowers, someone said, “when the sunflower wilts and dies, that’s like our life cycle. We are born, then teenagers, then grown ups, then old grown ups, then we die.” Then someone asked if sunflowers were ever teenagers like people are. Such deep thinkers they are! We read about what plants need and how weeds can hurt plants by taking their food, water and sunlight. On our way outside to play one day this week, they were thrilled to find millions of clovers and their flowers growing all over the field. Once we discussed how these clovers are weeds, they were very concerned that the “flowers” would be hurt by the bad clover weeds. Once they found out that the flowers themselves are part of the weed, they then started stomping on the flowers and clover calling them “bad!” and that they would kill all the grass. I think if I had let them, they would have pulled all of them up right then! We had a great time Thursday spending the entire morning making a color garden of construction paper flowers and plants. There was a lot of good, relevant, conversation going on. Next week, we will discuss camping and go on a nature walk on Friday.
Boy! The gnats are fierce! We are nearly carried away at recess and at car dismissal every day…especially all of these damp cloudy days we’ve been having. It’s pretty bad when the kids are asking to come inside from recess early because of bugs! The joys of spring in Charleston!
Hard to believe there’s only 35 days of school remaining. While I’m always ready to enjoy summer break, it’s always hard to wind up the school year. They are so fascinated by EVERYTHING! They can not get enough information and they ask so many good, thought provoking questions. I enjoy teaching this age precisely because of their never-failing ability to be completely absorbed in what they are doing/learning. We spent 15 minutes of recess one day simply watching ladybugs crawl through the grass. Never-ending wonder! There’s a lot going on in our personal lives this time of year and there’s a lot going on at school. Thanks for your ongoing support and help.
Enjoy your weekend! I might check out the Sand and Sea Festival at Folly if the weather is nice.
Take time,
Kristi
The wonderful world of insects…we’ve discussed all kinds of insect facts this week. We’ve learned about their 3 body parts, 6 legs, metamorphosis, exoskeletons, life cycles and more. We’ve discussed beetles, whirl-a-gigs, roaches, ants, ladybugs, butterflies, grasshoppers, mosquitoes, aphids, and callapitters…yes…I know it’s not spelled correctly, but that is how it has been pronounced so many times this week that now, I have to stop and think of the correct way to say it myself. In discussing honeybees and their contribution to society, someone quickly deduced that honey is bee vomit and that pretty much ended the conversation immediately. Someone said, “this just freaks me out.” Not being one to cause “freaking out” on any level, I changed the subject to something far less freakish. It’s been a good week. Next week, we have another 4 day week and we will discuss oviparous animals. We will have our spring egg hunt on Thursday.
Even though this is only Thursday, it’s the end of our week together. I have a teacher workday tomorrow. It is sooo needed! I have snack shopping to do, report cards to finish, lesson plans to get to and a myriad of tasks that require more time than I have…I hope your weekend is a good one. Looks like Saturday is awash in thunderstorms. We are approaching spring break! 44 days of school remaining!
Take time!
Kristi
Oh the joys of spring in Charleston…my eyes and nose are itchy with the pollen, not to mention my white vehicle is pale yellow now, plus the gnats are ready to eat me alive at recess every day! The azaleas and pear trees are beautiful however!
We have had a good week learning about animal habitats, the pond and pond animals. We’ve spent some time also discussing the frog life cycle. I will say, I’m a little freaked out by large birds (all those who walked with me at Magnolia Gardens as we encountered the ginormous Candian geese in our walking path know what I mean) but I do love watching great blue herons and egrets. Some of our pond pictures we looked at included many of these beautiful water birds. The children enjoyed learning about frogs and other pond amphibians, such as salamanders. They were particularly fascinated/grossed out with the fact that salamanders shed and EAT their own skins. We read both non-fiction and fiction books about pond animals all week. One of my favorite fiction books is a pop-up book called The Wide-Mouthed Frog. You’ve probably heard it, but this wide-mouthed frog chats up all of his friends and neighbors exclaiming repeatedly, and wide-mouthlike that he’s a wide-mouthed frog and he likes to eat flies. He also asks his friends what they like to eat. Most of them respond with bugs, worms, mice, etc…until he reaches the alligator. The alligator shares that he likes to eat wide-mouthed frogs at which point the wide-mouthed frog becomes very tight-lipped and says he doesn’t see any of those. We enjoyed making our faces look like the wide-mouthed frog and like the tight-lipped frog. Fortunately, someone then shared that the wide-mouthed frog looked like his little sister. I mean, what would I write about each week if the kids didn’t provide me with such good material?? And then, as it usually happens, the conversation shifted to everyone’s little sister/brother because, apparently, everyone has one (whether they do or not).
So, next week we talkabout insects and then oviparous animals the following week. And then, oh yes…spring break!
I hope your weekend plans include something fun! Hopefully the weather will be nice.
