Welcome back to school.! No matter how you spent your week off, we hope that you enjoyed some quality time with your families. Your children are a joy to spend time with. We consider ourselves very lucky to be their teachers this year.

Before our winter break, we spent a very exciting week celebrating Valentine’s Day. This holiday reinforces the act of kindness towards others. We transformed under our loft into a post office where the children would make and “mail” valentines to each other. They used markers, scissors, crayons and stencils to make their creations. We loved hearing the chatter amongst each of them about how to spell names and words that they needed to write. When they come to us about spelling a word, we will often give them a minute to maybe tell us a possible letter sound that the word might have. We will then either recite the letters of that word to them or write the word down for them to copy. This is all a step towards the children becoming young authors.

We also spent time working on our family valentines which were in the shape of a dog. We played with pink play dough and hearts and we even got to paint Mrs. KInd’s pants.! I bet you thought that they were making that one up :)

On Valentine’s Day, the children came into school and then mailed their own valentines which they had made at home to their classmates. This was so much fun for them! We were also very impressed by how they read each classmate’s name on each bag.

We also enjoyed a special valentine snack…

Lastly, we had a wonderful visit from Marcus’ mom. She told us all about Chinese New Year and the significance of it. She did a cute project with the children and read them a book. Thank you so much, Chelsi, for enlightening all of us on this wonderful holiday!

This book is a favorite of ours. It talks about all of the different feelings that your heart can have. After the book, we discussed when our hearts feel all of these different feelings. We made sure that we told the children that adults have these feelings also. We ended our discussion by asking how our heart was feeling right then?