Dear Families,
I wanted to point out upcoming events and dates.
We have a few outings and days off coming up!
May 09 – Walking trip to the Berkeley Public Library (West Branch). Please let us know if you can join us. We’ll be leaving campus at 10am and arriving back on campus by 11:45, in time for lunch on campus! I sent home library card applications on Friday. Please have them filled out and turn them in by Monday! (Even if you have one already for your child, please indicate as such so I know that I can keep track of who has turned on in!)
May 10 – Minimum day. We’ll have early dismissal on 5/10 at 12:20pm. We’ll eat lunch with the kids as usual, but be ready for an early pick up!
May 16 – Field trip to UC Botanical Gardens. The field trip slip should be coming out this week. Please see if you can join us for a parent carpool!
May 19 – Day at the Park (meet at Codornices Park from 10:00am – 2:00pm)
May 27 – Memorial Day (no school)
May 31 – Beach Day at Robert Crown Beach in Alameda (9:00 – 2:00pm)
June 7 – Last day of school, half day! Dismissal is at 12:20pm!
Our Readathon week was dressing up as book characters, visiting authors, our annual book swap, and, of course, reading!
We carried books around with us on Monday in case the gong was rung for Drop Everything and Read (D.E.A.R.). It happened during Math and again during Art and the kids settled right in for 10 minutes of reading!
Transformation Tuesday was a fun one where people dressed up like favorite book characters, if they wanted to! Can you identify who was represented in our class?
Our annual Book Swap was a success and many books found new homes on Wednesday!
Buddies came down to read with our class.
Finally, our Readathon culminated in a “day” of reading. Temescalians brought in sleeping bags, blankets, pillows, and stuffies to get cozy as they read through the day.
We had three authors visit throughout the week! Our first visiting author was Natasha Tripplett, author of Juneteenth Is, a picture book about Juneteenth. She shared that she wrote this book as a starting point to let others know about this day that she didn’t know about until she was an adult. She also shared about her family, how they celebrate Juneteenth, and how she does her writing in a tree house! To learn more about her, click on this link about Natasha Tripplett!
Michael Leali also came to visit and shared about his writing process. He was a teacher before, in Chicago, and his most recent book, Matteo, it is a type of re-telling of Pinocchio, where the character is trying to be a “real boy”. He shared that your story matters, shared about his early stories, and how people sometimes use familiar stories and retell them with a new perspective. If you’d like to see him for a book signing for his newest book, The Truth about Triangles, he’ll be at Mrs. Dalloway’s on Monday, May 20 at 6:30pm!
Finally, we had Christina Newhard come visit. Her focus is to share tales from the Philippines and she read Kalipay and the Tiniest Tiktik: A Cebuano Tale. Â A story about a little girl who befriends an unusual friend. She also shared a book that her publishing company published called Jalal and the Lake. It is a story of putting the environment before personal wants. The kids got to color pages from the book.
As part of the Norman Johnson fund, we got to invite visiting artists to teach us about their art. Our visiting artist was Mark Romero. He showed us the art of charcoal wipeout drawing and showed us his own art.
We are wrapping up our unit 4 of Math: telling time and fractions. Continue talking to your Temescalians about time and challenge them to tell you the time on analog clocks. They should be well-versed with skip counting by 5s by now. More practice is always better when mastering the skill of telling time!
We also started a new unit in Science: Matter and Motion. We are currently looking at forces at play, through the vehicle of magnetic forces. Temescalians were tasked with trying to replicate an image with materials given and take note of what happened. The station they enjoyed most was trying to balance 3 donut magnets on a pencil. The most challenging station was trying to make the magnets “talk” to one another and balance without flipping over or sticking together.
Finally, we celebrated all of the April birthdays this week, including my own!
