A Few February Activities

February is a busy month in the classrooms: we celebrated 100 days of school, Chinese New Year, and participated in a Give Love project. We had great participation!

Here are a few pictures of our kids celebrating Chinese New Year. We had to celebrate a little late, as the snow days kept us at home on the real holiday!

Each site participates in a Give Love program during February. For the last three years, Crossover has collected stuffed animals and visited Scottish Rite Hospital to pass them out to the patients there. It is important to us to teach our children to give back to the community, and they really enjoy it! The kids also really liked seeing all the sights at the hospital--they have a lot of big fish tanks and kid-friendly artwork and sculptures. When they finished passing out their stuffed animals, they sang a few songs in the atrium. Here are a few pictures:

Water Damage Forces Three Classrooms to Close

 

Water damage has forced the closure of our Wesley Rankin location in West Dallas for the remainder of 2011. The Wesley-Rankin Community Center which housed our center suffered severe building damage due to a water pipe breakage during the extreme cold weather in Dallas two weeks ago.  Mi Escuelita's Wesley-Rankin location included offices and three classrooms for 55 preschoolers.

We are very heart broken about this tragedy. Continuing their education is very important for the children's preparation for kindergarten, so we have made every effort to move the students to one of our other five preschool locations. We feel strongly that each child should remain in school. Fortunately, we have room at our other centers to accommodate our students. Our Crossover and St. Matthew's locations have each added a classroom to their site and our Cockrell Hill location is gaining new students in existing classrooms as well.

While insurance will pay for a portion of the damages suffered, Mi Escuelita must raise $50,000 to replace classroom and office equipment, teaching supplies, and office and classroom furnishings. Unfortunately, because the school and community center were closed due to the snow and ice, the problem was only discovered by a passerby who noticed water pouring out of the building's front door. The pipes broke on the second floor, flooding our first-floor classrooms from the top down, which caused damage in addition to the standing water. Books were ruined, all the charts and pictures on the wall were damaged, cabinets and puzzles left in water became warped. One of the worst losses was our teachers' curriculum books, filled with notes, ideas, examples and resources gathered over the years. 

How you can help:

• Donate school supplies or organize a donations drive at your workplace or school. We need to replace school supplies in all three of those classrooms. 
• Needed items: paper goods (toilet paper, paper towels, dixie cups, kleenex), copy paper, construction paper, manila paper, craft materials like pipe cleaners, googly eyes, crayons, markers, spiral notebooks, tempera paint
• For more information on needs, contact Caroline Smiley at csmiley@miescuelita.org
• Share this story by linking to this blog post or connecting with us via facebook or twitter. The more people that know, the more that can help.
• Stay connected with us, as we have new needs come up, we will be sure to share with the Mi Escuelita community.  

Pictures of the Wesley Rankin water damage can be seen on our Picasa site.

January Overview

At the end of each month, our teachers, Site Managers and Family Advocates put together an overview, which our Program Director, Prerna Richards, sends out. Each site usually recognizes one of their classrooms, or they send pictures of all the different activities that happened during the previous month. It's a great way to stay connected with all the different classrooms!


Crossover would like to recognize Class 3 this month. As we talk about the new year and new beginnings, it reminds us of Ms. Gonzales in Class 3 who is new this year, and doing a great job learning from her mentor and lead teacher, Ms. Negron. They make a great pair! They showed off their teamwork skills by being the first ones to finish the Lap 3 assessments, and their classroom always displays lots of varied activities, including a lot of parental support!

Cockrell Hill would like to recognize Ms. Cano's class this month. She has started implementing the Second Step program, a program designed to promote social competence and reduce social-emotional problems. She has put up Second Step posters around the classroom and the children play around the posters, talk to the posters, and act out what the posters reflect. It's a very neat program! If you are interested in learning more, check it out here. In Mrs. Martinez's class, the children had been learning about Eric Carle and reading his books. She was very surprised when the children told her that they had seen Eric Carle, and that he was here, over by the computers! She went to look and found our nutritionist, Geary Laird. The children were very convinced he was Eric Carle because he looked very much like the pictures they had seen of him.

Here's a picture of our nutritionist, Geary, doing a presentation to the kids:
 
And here's a picture of Eric Carle:

I can definitely see the resemblance! 

At Bethany, the children are really enjoying their new math activities. They have particularly enjoyed the shape finder--they walk all around the classroom identifying different shapes! They also enjoyed sorting canned food and discussing what was in each can, whether it was a fruit or a vegetable, and which ones they liked best. When we had snow a few weeks ago, the children went outside to feel the snow and discovered ice as well! They brought some snow and ice inside and monitored it melting with their new thermometer.

Buckner would like to highlight Mrs. Cross's classroom. They are learning about different types of animals and how to make bubbles.The children even learned how to milk a cow and what it feels like. Mrs. Cross made a prediction chart to ask the children open-ended questions about this topic, and some of the children responded that after milking the cow, they would buy the milk from the store and make pancakes! Last week the children learned all about different kinds of animals--zoo animals, farm animals and wild animals. They had fun with activities that reinforced what they were learning by sorting the animals according to size and other criteria. They also did a science activity where they learned how to make bubbles and made a chart showing which brand of soap made the best bubbles. We recently celebrated National Hug Day and the teachers had a competition to see who could give and receive the most hugs. Mrs. Cross won with 89 hugs in one day!

St. Matthew's had a new volunteer Foster Grandparent start in January--Ms. Dominguez. The children love having her and interacting with her and all the volunteers at St. Matthew's! It is fun for them to get so much extra attention from the volunteers. This month St. John's Episcopal School's 5th graders came to do math activities with our students, which was very enjoyable and educational! St. Matthew's would like to recognize Ms. Silva and Ms. Duran's class for always having such varied and creative activities always ready in advance in a very clean, organized and fun classroom! 

No update from Wesley Rankin this month, but we'll catch up with them at the end of February. Great job to all our teachers and staff! Hope you enjoyed this peek into classroom life!