January 5th, 2024

 

Hello Blackberry Families,

 

Happy New Year! We want to welcome everyone back. It’s been a short week but we have had lots of fun sharing about what we did over our Holiday Break. We’ve had many opportunities to discuss how families may celebrate (or may not celebrate) this time, how it may look different or similar. We had an overview for 3D geometric shapes (triangular prism, rectangular prism, pyramid, sphere, cube, cylinder), and were introduced to 4 new vocabulary words: melting, pale, warning, and tremble. 

We celebrated Sam’s birthday, and Sam’s parents joined us for a Birthday Circle. We saw photos of Sam throughout the years, read a story, we sang happy birthday and he jumped into his year!

As a part of Cultural Studies, the teachers also had a chance to share what we did on our breaks. We discussed various traditions and ways people celebrate in Latin America for the Holidays. Leslie had a chance to share photos of when her family made tamales by hand with her family. Explaining the long process, talking about the ingredients, but more importantly, we discussed the gender roles of making tamales. Viewing how traditionally, women made the tamales, however, this does not always need to be the case! Especially, when everyone enjoys them. Leslie’s photos ended with sharing how her grandfather joined in and helped make the tamales! 

 

Mark shared photos of his trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.  He shared pictures of visiting archaeological sites including Mayan pyramids. He explained the meanings of certain glyphs, pyramids, as well as geography facts about each. Students were able to catch a glimpse of how these ancient civilizations operated!

We ended the day with going to The Strawberry Creek Park! Everyone enjoyed themselves and had a great time!

 

Gracias y Saludos,

Mark and Leslie