Some of you have noticed or mentioned that it has been an extra busy start to the year. This is, in part, due to some staffing changes. Well, hopefully we're on the road to routine as we're extremely excited to officially welcome Mrs. Teri Zonneveld to our team! Mrs. Zonneveld (or Mrs. Z to some of the younger kids) worked with us last year as a long term guest para, and again this year as a long term guest para. We are delighted that she has accepted a permanent position in our program! Mrs. Z. will be working primarily with 2nd and 3rd grades and also helping out in kindergarten. She's a wonderful addition to our team!
We are also very excited to welcome Cameron C. to our program! Cameron is a 4th grader who joined us this week and he's already making friends over the Thomas the Train set and doing great work! Welcome Cameron--we are glad you're here!
As the week unfolded, we spent a lot of time working on problem sizes and reaction sizes. This is another foundational concept for our program that we will continue to work on throughout the year, but it was fun to reintroduce it to students. Students learned to categorize problems and rate their sizes and then decide how we should respond to these problems. Something that I always stress with students and would appreciate if it could be reiterated at home as well, is that we can always choose how we respond to situations, people, problems etc. We are in charge of ourselves and even if we may be feeling one way, we are free to decide on a different reaction. We spent some time acting out different reactions (and sizes) and realized how silly we look when we overreact to situations. We will be working on this next week as well.
Joke of the week: "What is a ghost's favorite ride? A scary-go-round!"
We didn't do an emotional vocabulary word of the week--it was not in the cards. :)