Monday, March 20th

Hello Weckie Parents,
It's me again, Mrs. Weckstein!! The last 10 weeks have been pretty incredible for me. It has been wonderful to watch Mara Lempert transform into a solid teacher and form bonds with our kids that won't soon be forgotten. Thank you to everyone who helped send in food and paper products for our party as well as books and book pages. Mara's book turned out pretty special and she left with a huge basket of books to start her classroom library from our classroom.

I will say though, it sure is nice to be back in the saddle again and not just in the background!! Ms. Lempert has arrived safely in Florida and today was her first official day in her new placement in Immokolee (hope I'm spelling this right) somewhere near Ft. Meyers.

Last week was a bit of a transition, which was to be expected, after the kids had adjusted so nicely to Mara's teaching style and away from mine! We revisited expectations for listening in the reading corner, stamina during Reader's Workshop, jobs in the classroom, etc. By the end of the week, we were back up and operating again with Mrs. Weckstein's routines and expectations in place.

St. Patrick's Day
Not to mention, but you may have heard we also had some sneaky visitors last week!! St. Patrick's Day at Dublin ranks up with the Polar Express in my love for fun things to do with the kids in Kindergarten. It was incredible to watch on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon how the kids came together and worked for hours, uninterrupted on their traps without a tattle, argument, kid off task or any problems! Supplies were shared and between all the kids brought in on top of all I have accumulated in my craft tub, we constructed some pretty well thought out traps! The kids worked collaboratively in groups and others worked solo, while sharing ideas with one another to help improve each other's traps! While it would be wonderful to say we caught a leprechaun, sadly, all we got were chocolate rollos (gold), gold and green shamrock coins, green beaded necklaces, the books all dumped in the reading corner and one of us had her knees turn green for drinking from her water bottle which had also magically turned green! It was a WONDERFUL day to be a Weckie!

Reader's Workshop
Reader's Workshop has tied in nicely this month with March is Reading Month! We have had 1, 2 and even some days with 3 mystery readers. We have met first graders, fifth graders, WLCSD administrators, a local book author, and soon, many of our parents! It's not too late if you are interested in coming to read - we can make it work, trust me! We have been learning about different genres of books people like to read, learning about some new favorite picture books that have been shared, places people find comfy to read as well as what books many of the adults loved reading as
children.

Children's Author and WLCSD Community Education Director: Sandy Richards George

Grayson's older brother Gabe and 5th Grade Buddy Logan

Lunch Lady Mrs. Schmitt

Principal Mr. Drewno

Former fourth grader of mine, Sean MacLaren, who comes EVERY single year on his favorite holiday, St. Patrick's Day!

In Workshop this past week we took a look back at Reading Strategies first introduced in the beginning of the year. It is my BIG goal to get our readers' armed with a load of strategies that they can use to tackle tricky words. Many of our readers are able to read pattern books but struggle when new words are introduced. Using these strategies, I am hoping to see great growth these last few months in reading. We will carry the strategies during mini-lessons, Independent Reading, Partner Reading and Reading Groups. Two forms of the strategies will be coming home in your child's folder this week. We have already sent home the bookmarks for "Eagle Eye" and today/tomorrow the bookmarks for "Lips the Fish" will be in your child's book bag. Check your child's folder for a massive sheet that will show you all of the strategies as well as a laminated bookmark with all of the strategies. Please hang on to this, please use this, this will help your reader- guaranteed!

Reading Groups have also resumed in high gear! We have 10+ weeks to get these kids reading and to get many of them to grade level. Please check your child's report card for their latest placement, but please do not panic if they are below or approaching grade level. There are a lot of great things in place and for some extra support where needed. Consistently reading the books that come home each night and hanging onto the bag until it is due back is very helpful. Keep the schedule handy so you can stay on top of the reading. Most nights there will be 1-2 familiar books and 1 new book. Please spend time with these books, not only reading, but rereading for fluency (so that it sounds smooth and not choppy) as well as retelling the events of the book, noting when strategies were used for tricky words, connections the kids can make to the events of the story, and asking your child to point out different words on the pages. Please make sure to sign the form so that I know the book(s) have been read at home. I will do my best to see all reading groups on every given day on the schedule and many days this is do-able! Referring back to the Reading Strategies can be VERY helpful for building that toolbox of strategies for your child.

Word Wall Cards also came home this week in collaboration with our push to really pump up our reading and writing in these last ten weeks. One thing reflective on the report cards was how strong our class is with mathematics skills. Our area of focus now is reading and writing! Those Language Arts components that are key to a lower elementary classroom need some extra work and I'm ready for the challenge, are you? Please use these cards at home. We spent a great deal of time making them and the kids are learning games for sight words where being able to recall the spelling fast would be helpful! Use magnetic letters at home, shaving cream on a table, magna-doodles, paper and markers, whatever it takes, we can master these words!

Writer's Workshop
We are in the midst of a very fun unit in Workshop! Our next unit is our informational How-To unit. Students are working on composing how-to's for things they consider themselves experts. Topics like: how to brush your teeth, how to crack an egg, how to draw a smiley face, how to make your bed and more have been explored these past two weeks. It has been fun to act out how-to's as well, like how to wash your hands. You'd be surprised how many steps are involved in such a thing! It has been great.

Unit 3 on Pattern Books wrapped up right at the end of Ms. Lempert's student teaching. She did a great deal of work daily with the kids on writing pattern books. These packets will come home this week with a rubric sheet on the front showcasing the goals we wanted each child to accomplish in this unit. While you may see many are checked off, look through your kiddoes work and you may see they have accomplished more. The goals checked off were demonstrated solely during conferences. Be sure to celebrate all the work your child did on their pattern books. They were engaged in these books for quite some time!

Science 
This new science unit has been SO much fun! We are learning all about push and pull as forces of motion. We have explored items in our classroom that use push and pull as well as a large tub of Liam's toys (my little guy) who has many toys with push buttons and pull strings! It has been fun to notice that some objects use both push and pull to make motion. We explored the Dublin playground and found examples out there too of push and pull all around us. We plan to wrap this unit up in the next week or so and then a Journal of Push and Pull will come home with your child so you can see all that they have explored and learned in our unit.

Student Council Sock Hop
Wednesday night is our Student Council Sponsored Sock Hop - while I know many of you are new to Dublin, I have to give this event a plug as I'm practically in charge of the whole thing and feel like I'm throwing a wedding later this week for 600 people, like in 48 hours!! If you haven't come before, you SHOULD! You can still buy tickets at the door, $2 per person, and that gets you your choice of three of the following options: water bottle, fresh hot popcorn, rice krispie treat and root beer floats! Everyone comes dressed in their best fifties gear - poodle skirts, capri pants, white shirts on the guys, hair slicked back etc. In addition, all of your donations have helped create a pretty phenomenal Silent Auction Lego basket for us to auction off! All of the funds raised will be going right back to our classroom teachers this spring for classroom spending as well as a few projects around the school. There will also be a teacher auction there where the kids can purchase tickets to WIN time with ME! That's right, one boy and one girl from each K class (and every other grade too) can win a special date with their teacher. The K winners will get to stay after school one day with the K Team Teachers, have ice cream sundaes and play the most intensely fun game of Hide and Seek throughout the entire school - it's seriously SO much fun!  If you haven't purchased tickets yet, I strongly suggest you still come up at 6pm on Wednesday night to the event with your family and buy tickets at the door. It's the best night at Dublin! Just to give you an idea - as of today, when I closed ticket pre-sales, we had 401confirmed people in attendance and many years we go over 600!

Friday, March 3rd

Hello Kindergarten families! Happy March! As many of you know, March is reading month. We've kicked off our Mystery Readers this week and the children have really enjoyed it. It's very fun! We have a lot of awesome theme days coming up next week! Your kindergarteners have been super busy in school! I've loved learning so much about each and every one of them. It's been such a pleasure getting to work with all of your little ones! I will be so sad to leave them next Friday!

Readers' Workshop:
During reader’s workshop, kindergarteners have been working on how they can read words. They can: look at the pictures, use their knowledge of sight words to read some words fast, or look at the first letter (sounding out!). They've done a great job with this. I've seen a lot of great improvement during independent/partner reading time. Reading at home with your children is so beneficial for your child’s development in literacy :)

 

Writers' Workshop:
 In writer's workshop, we have been super busy! Kindergarteners are working on publishing their writing. They've worked on many different pattern books. Now, they're picking the one they're most proud of to share with our 3rd grade-reading buddies. It will be very fun to see everyone's finished products!


Math Workshop:
 Your children have been busy with math as well! We've done a lot! Last week and this week, we’ve worked with ten frames and did a little bit of work with double ten frames. We’ve worked on different ways to represent numbers and have played a number of games involving ten frames. Kindergarteners did well with these! We also did a fun activity with shapes. We talked about how shapes are all around us! Basically, everything is made of shapes. We went on a shape walk on the playground and found many different shapes outside! Everyone enjoyed that! Yesterday, we introduced the “equal” symbol and kindergarteners did a fun activity with popsicle sticks to practice showing equal numbers. Today, we introduced the addition symbol and everyone got to make their very own “Gus the Plus.” This was very fun! You will see them at home shortly!

Science:
 This week we jumped back into science! On Monday, we talked about things that move! As a class, we brainstormed a list of things that move. Then, we tested how different things move such as, a ball, a car, a plane, a snake, a paperclip, etc. We talked about what makes things move (pushing things (force), blowing on things, etc.) Everyone was very engaged during this! It was a very fun topic. Ask your children about it!

Have a great weekend! :-) Miss Lempert

Monday, January 30, 2017

Hello Weckie Families!!

It has been a busy, but fun couple of weeks in Kindergarten😀. The addition of Miss Lempert in our classroom has been fantastic! The kids are really getting to know her, her teaching style and I'm most certain she is learning a lot from them too. It's exciting when we get the opportunity to have a Student Teacher as they bring a wealth of new ideas, new energy and passion to the classroom. Miss Lempert has been gradually taking over more and more of the teaching responsibilities in the classroom while I'm right alongside observing, coaching, and getting to work with students who may need extra help.

PBIS Recess We were so excited to finally fill up our PBIS Shamrock Board in the main hallway! As a treat, when a grade level fills up the board with hard earned shamrocks, they get an extra 20 minute recess! We were sure to pick a nice, mid-forties, sunny day to go out and play with the whole grade!


Reader's Workshop
We have just begun our third unit in Reader's Workshop and have been working on learning all about characters! Our Mentor Text, the tale of Chicken Little, has helped to teach us all about characters in stories. We have been using the chart shown below to guide our study of characters. Each child had time to put themselves into the role of a character and tell about themselves before we took apart Chicken Little as a character and learned to describe him and Foxy Loxy. We have spent time looking for characters in our own texts that demonstrate the use of dialogue. Additionally we did some role playing with the characters from Chicken Little and the kids got to act the parts! Be sure to ask your child to retell you all about this story. To wrap up the unit this week, we will be making our own Chicken Little. If you are able, please send in ONE (or more) empty toilet paper rolls. We will need about 25 total. Thank you!

Word Wall Words: The Word Wall list is growing:  be, can, four, five, go, have, is, it, I, one, see, six, the, to, two, three, you - are all words currently on the word wall!

 Writer's Workshop
In Writer's Workshop we have also begun a new unit all about pattern books. A pattern book is a book that has a repeating line throughout each page of the book. Many of the sight word books we use are pattern books. Also books like Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See  and There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly  are also great examples of pattern books. Each author began working on their own book using the pattern: I see _______. We spent time talking about how to complete the sentence with good details, how to add a surprise ending on the fourth page, how to make the illustrations match the words and the dynamics of a sentence. It has been fun to watch our writers' blossom and create books on their own!

 

An Update from Miss Lempert:

Hello kindergarten families!

 

I’ve loved being able to get to know some of you and getting to work with your children every day! It’s been so fun getting to know your kindergartners. We’ve been learning a lot in kindergarten this past week.

 

In “Making Meaning” this week we read, “Charlie Needs a Cloak.” This book was about how a shepherd needs a new cloak and all the steps he goes through to make a new cloak. In the end, a sheep eats the cloak he worked so hard to make. Kindergarteners really enjoyed this book! We did a few retelling activities with this book, a sequencing activity where we put all the events in order, and then we did a writing piece. For the writing piece, we talked about how Charlie was very resilient. He never gave up on finishing his coat, even though his sheep gave him a hard time throughout the story! Kindergarteners were able to write about a time they were resilient and illustrated a picture to go along with it. I’m very proud of them for what they came up with! Their writing and drawings were awesome!

 

In math this week, we were doing a lot of work with combining! Tuesday and Wednesday were all about combining shapes to create hexagons. Kindergarteners explored shapes by playing with pattern blocks. They were all able to come up with ways to combine shapes (other than using hexagons) to create hexagons! For example, 6 triangles make a hexagon! They did really well with this activity. Thursday, we combined colored connecting cubes to build numbers in many ways. We found that there are many ways to show the number “5” using only 2 colors of cubes. Kindergarteners then had the opportunity to try this on their own. Every table had a different number (5, 6, 7, 8 or 9) to play around with. Everyone seemed to have fun with this! Recording sheets from both days were sent home in their folders. Take a look at their hard work!

 

I’m looking forward to being back with your children next week and have some more fun while we learn! I absolutely love kindergarten and can’t wait to see what exciting things will happen next week. Have a great weekend! :)

 

Important Dates:

Wednesday, February 1st: 1/2 Day of School - School dismisses between 12:00-12:09 depending on your mode of transportation!

 

Thursday, February 2nd:  Jump Rope for Hearth Health Kick-Off Assembly - info came home last week on a mini-magnet! Please check the Dublin Times for more information.

 

Friday, February 3rd: Pennies for Patients Coin Collection Day

 

 

Friday, January 13th

Hello Weckie Families!

Happy Friday and long weekend! We have been super busy in Kindergarten - and having so much fun!! It has been great to add Miss Lempert to our classroom and always nice to have a second teacher around too.  We have been working hard since we came back from Winter Break! If you happen to be in our hallway, come check out our New Years' Resolutions on the bulletin board. Lots of great ideas for us to try in 2017.

Thank you to everyone who sent in money for our first Pasta for Patients collection today. Remember you can do it online at this address: http://tinyurl.com/WeckiePennies  . We will be collecting again next Friday. Thank you so much for your support... it would be pretty cool to raise the most money of any class!


Reader's Workshop:
In Reader's Workshop we have been working on oral retellings of some of our favorite books! Being able to orally retell a story is a wonderful reading comprehension strategy for our young readers. Last week we spent a lot of time reading and re-reading the story of "There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly". We learned the song and then created our own "Old Lady" as a visual to help us to retell the events of the story in order. We also read some variations on the original, such as "There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow", "Who Swallowed A Bell", "Who Swallowed a Pie" and so on. We had great fun learning to retell this story that we did another story this past week. This week we used Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle's "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" to retell the events of the story. Miss Lempert did a lot of work with the kids reading and retelling the story. Then each child created their own visual for this story where their coloring of each animal had to match the story. Then we got to retell the story without the book using our Brown Bear visual! Look for these to come home. Be sure to have your child use both the old lady and the bear to retell these beloved stories to you and your family.

Meanwhile Reading Groups are firing up and off to a great start!! Each child has received a colored canvas type bag with their name on the front. Each day that they work with me in their group, they will bring the bag home with them. Typically they will have ONE new book and ONE familiar book (old book). This way they have one that should be a familiar read for fluency and confidence, and one new book for them to learn to decode and use reading strategies to learn to read it. These books are leveled and have been selected to meet the strengths and needs of your child. We have 6 groups that I will continue to rotate and see to the best of my ability! Every group should hopefully meet 2-3 times a week depending on their needs. Please make sure to spend ample time at home with the books that come home. Read them a few times, have your child point out different words, help them to break apart new words by sounds or use the illustration to help them. You can ask them to retell their story too - what happened first, then, next, last, etc! When returning the book(s) be sure to sign the Reading Form and keep this in their canvas book bag. So far we are doing an awesome job taking books home and returning them on time - way to go!

*Our new sight word this week was: be

Writer's Workshop
We continue to work on our Writing Wizard unit with the kids. It has been fun to watch their development in writing sounds, words and even sentences over the course of this unit! Soon we will be wrapping up this unit and moving onto a new unit!

One of our latest Writing Wizard's with his completed work.

We have also been toying with the idea of Writing Folders and what they will look like this year in Kindergarten. We will probably begin to send these folders home in the next few weeks. There are directions inside the folder about how to use these "journals" at home to encourage your child to keep writing. This will also give you a chance to see what your child can do and what you can help them work on at home to strengthen their skills. Each week we will ask that they do a minimal of two writing entries, complete with a colored illustration. The writing is to be done in pencil, illustrations in crayons or colored pencils are great. You'll be side-by-side with your child to help them to phonetically spell each word (how it sounds, regardless if a word is spelled correctly) unless it is a sight word, which they should be able to do on their own! More info to come soon :-).

Math Workshop

Collecting our favorite color data for our graph!

We have been super busy in Math lately! We have done several math station rotations to practice learning new math games including: Roll and Record, Monster Squeeze, Number Top It, Spin and Move and more! This past week it has been all: shapes, shapes and more shapes!! Your child should be familiar with these 2-D shapes and names: circle, square, triangle, rectangle, trapezoid and hexagon. Please review these shapes at home with your child - they are everywhere when you stop and look! We have spent time talking about attributes of shapes (their characteristics that make them the same and different). We have been using the Connect Ed Software to incorporate technology into our exploration of these shapes. We sorted the attribute blocks whole group and small group. We talked about how we all have different attributes too (kids with jeans on vs. kids with buttons on). Kids got to pick attribute blocks out of a Mystery Bag, solely based on the attributes they could feel! This was a super fun challenge! We ended our week with a graphing activity where we determined that blue is the most popular favorite color in our class and yellow is the least popular!

Sorting out the attribute blocks on the Interactive White Board.

We had fun incorporating the technology of Connect Ed!

Unit 4 HomeLinks will be coming home with your child today and are filled with awesome reinforcements of all we have been doing in school. Most of the activities are pretty quick and very well liked! 


Social Studies
In Social Studies this week we have been talking about Diversity and tying it in with learning about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the holiday on Monday. We have read a few great books about Dr. King and have also spent time with Todd Parr's book "It's Okay to be Different". Each child created their own page to go in a class made book about what they think about diversity - like it's okay to have blue eyes or it's okay to like the color pink. It's been pretty neat to hear what the kids think about diversity and why people should be treated equally and fairly all the time. I think many were pretty stunned to learn that people were once treated differently because of their skin color. While we keep the convo pretty light, each child was receptive and engaged. They were curious and also glad to hear that the laws had changed.

PBIS Teams
The first Thursday of each month we meet with our K-2 Multi-Age Teams. A few of our kids stay and are a part of Weckstein's Warriors, while the majority travel to a different K-2 teacher and school wide, K-5, we are doing the same lessons about positive behavior plan for Dublin. We focus on the shamrock characteristics: be responsible, be respectful, be resilient and have good integrity. This month January we are focusing on having good integrity. Your's truly was responsible for planning the building wide lesson and I put our kids to work! The vast majority (not all) have drawn a picture of when they have shown good integrity and we created a video and large bulletin board display in our hallway! Our kid's had some awesome ideas of ways that they have had good integrity. I'm proud to spend my time with such a great group of kids :-).

Important Upcoming Dates:
-January 16- NO SCHOOL in Observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

• January 20 Pennies for Patients Spare Change Collection #2 
• January 20 PTA Family Bingo Night (6:30-8:30 PM) Cafeteria - Please come, the Weckstein's are hoping to be there!! :-)

Welcome Miss Lempert!!

Hello 204 Families!
 Welcome back and Happy 2017! I hope you had a wonderful break and were able to enjoy the time off from school with your Weckie! We are eager to get back into the swing of things here in Kindergarten. I would like to take a moment to introduce a new face in our classroom. Mara Lempert will be joining us from Central Michigan University as a Student Teacher for about the next 10 weeks. You will be hearing more from her in the next few days but we are excited to have her here. She'll be getting to know the kids quickly as they are already very interested and happy to have her here. Soon she'll be shadowing me and eventually teaching the kids during the day as well. Welcome Miss Lempert!!

 

Monday, December 19th

Phew has it been busy and fun in Kindergarten lately!! There's lot to catch you up on so sit back and enjoy!

Winter Weather
As you know the weather has changed drastically in the last few weeks. Please make sure that your child is bringing their outdoor weather clothes daily to school - a winter jacket, snow pants (please check them for holes), boots, warm socks, hat, gloves/mittens and anything else they may need to stay warm. It is important to label these items (I know this is tricky), because we are losing things left and right! We ask that your child bring their winter gear home daily because often times it is soaked and needs to be dried overnight at home. Please check daily to make sure. We have had a few snow pants come back on the second day already pretty stinky because they've sat wet in backpacks overnight. The school district policy is that we are outdoors unless the windchill is below 0 OR the precipitation falling is too heavy or too wet for the kids to be outside. This past week we had several indoor recess days due to the cold wind chills.

Book Fair
This was a record breaking year for the Book Fair!! Our Media Center sold over $10,000 worth of books!! Thank you to the many generous families who helped donate money to our classroom for books - you should see the pile of new books I was able to shop for at the Book Fair. Your generosity is appreciate and noticed! As a result of the Book Fair being in the Media Center the last two weeks, students have not been able to check out books to take home. Today we finally returned our books and your Weckie should come home today with a book as long as they turned in their book. Remember, next Friday we have no school, so these books are not due back officially until January 6, however the Library Tub is always in our classroom and available for book returns any day.


Winter Holiday Party
In place of the traditional holiday party, I like to do it a little different in Kindergarten! You should have received a note home last week explaining that we will be doing a Polar Express party. The kids are pretty hyped up to be going on the Polar Express and I have been pretty vague! The room will be transformed into a train and yours' truly will be our conductor! We are looking for a few parents to help during the party. Our Super Mom Maria French has been through this one before and has volunteered to handle all of the tokens the kids receive along the way on the party but we need help with the following jobs:

-2 Hot Cocoa Makers - this job needs a little explaining but if you can bring and help make hot cocoa and serve it for our train ride, you're on :-)
-1 Reindeer Food Mom - We have all the supplies, you'll just help run the station
-1 Cookie Mom - please bring 30 cookies (we have 25 kids) and help serve them at the party

If you are able to do one of these jobs, please email me ASAP at JenniferPhillips@wlcsd.org. Our Party will follow the school sing along. The Sing Along begins at 2:00pm in the Cafeteria and then our train ride will begin from our room at 2:30pm approximately. Please remember your child can wear their pajamas to school on Thursday to help set the mood for our party :-).


Reader's Workshop
We have been BUSY in workshop doing all sorts of great things!! First and foremost, we LOVE partner reading! We have been taking time to get to know our partner's better and learning how to have good conversations. What can we talk about? We share our favorite parts in books, a part that made us laugh, a part that reminds us of something we have done before (making connections), or a part that surprised us. It has been fun to pop in and listen to the conversations the kids are having about their books!

Slowly but surely we are launching our guided reading groups! Look for a bright colored baggie to begin appearing home with your child in the next few weeks with activities and books to share at home! More info to come - they are pretty self explanatory early on as we learn this new routine.

Sight Words include: see, the, a, is, I, it, like, can, to, go, me

Writer's Workshop
We continue to move along in our Writing Wizard unit and it has been awesome to see more of our kids taking risks and writing during workshop time! Many have got the drawing part down and can label their illustrations. The Wizard's role helps model how to stretch out words and write sentences which is what I'm seeing happening more and more in my writing conferences with the kids! This is great! Typically around the middle of January we will start a writing folder at home as well. We ask that you take some time 2-3 nights a week and write with your child. You'll want them to do the writing but you can be that knowledgeable other that coaches and guides them to stretch out words and listen for the sounds as they construct sentences.

This week we also set goals in workshop! This was a big deal! We talked about what a goal was and why it should be challenging! Here's what we have so far...

Math Workshop
In Math we have been doing all sorts of great work focused around numbers. We have added daily number writing practice into our routine as we continue to build our knowledge of numbers and number sense. We have been working in our number writing journals at Math Stations and are up to the number 7. As a whole group we have actually written all of our numbers on the whiteboards up to 100 a couple of times over the course of a week! Math Stations have focused on counting objects, counting successive numbers as well as learning some of the Everyday Math games. We have mastered: Top It, Spinning Numbers and the Number Grid Game.

Social Studies

Our Social Studies unit right now is all about children and our different cultures. This ties in nicely in December as we have been exposing our Kindergarten kids to many different holidays celebrated in December: Hanukkah, Christmas/Los Posadas and Kwanzaa. We have been reading books, watching short videos and even got to taste latkes and spin a dreidel! Last week we talked about the tradition of the gingerbread men. While the kids were convinced my fear of them running away was foolish - you'll never believe what happened?? We lost our gingerbread men! They bolted right out of the oven!

The latkes were a hit with the kids!! Everyone enjoyed the potato pancakes and cleaned the tray empty!

Then it was on to making gingerbread men cookies! We couldn't wait to eat them!

They looked awesome and smelled wonderful!

We went to the staff  lounge to get our cookies and they were gone!!
So we ran to find Mr. Drewno in the office and he was STUNNED!

We even checked all of the surveillance cameras throughout the school to see if we could track them down!

We'll keep you posted! Be sure to follow us on Twitter for any breaking news updates! (@wearetheweckies)

Important Dates/Info
Please remember Winter Break begins at 4pm this Thursday, December 22nd and school resumes again on Wednesday, Jaunary 4th. Please have a wonderful holiday with your families, be safe and stay warm!