• Happy New Year!
• Preschool: Gingerbread Men and Houses
• EOEL: Weather
• Kindergarten: Tie Dye Shirts & Garden Update
• First Grade: Butterfly Garden & Kaiaka Park
• Second Grade: Pen Pals & Art Corner
• Third Grade: Zero Waste Station
• Literacy Corner: Hawaii Reads Q2 winners
• Congratulations Cane Fires!
• STEM Fest
• Kākou Connection January 2022 by Mrs. Nakamura
  

Happy New Year! I hope you all l had a great winter break! I got married during the break, so my new name is Mrs. Terada. I am really excited to share with you our latest newsletter.

This semester, we would like to highlight some of the bright spots at our school and focus in our classrooms. At times, we get bogged down on all the craziness that COVID brings that we tend to overlook the amazing work that our students and teachers are doing at our beautiful little school.

For this newsletter, we asked our Lower Grade Teachers (Preschool to 2nd grade) to share some exciting things that they are doing in class. We have included pictures and a few videos that show the awesome work that our students are participating in that make learning fun!

Our upper grades will be featured in our next newsletter, so be on the lookout in a couple weeks for that new edition. We also wanted to take this time to thank all of our families for their continued support and generosity during this year. We are so glad that we are in this together! Haleʻiwa Elementary has been going strong for 150 years, let's keep it going for 150 more.

The preschool explored Christmas decorations and their significance, literacy books were read. Each child made gingerbread ornaments and their own edible gingerbread man and house.

EOEL is excited to be moving on to our new unit of study this month! With the crazy amounts of rain and flooding, many of our students had questions and observations about the weather such as why does it rain, why it floods, and even why the weather changes! We thought digging deeper into the weather around us would be a fun and interesting topic of study as so many of our students had such amazing wonders! Our students have been hard at work creating different props for our classroom "Weather Station"!

In the photos attached you will see we created rain out of tin foil, microphones from toilet paper rolls, thermometers from popsicles sticks, and even remote controls from cardboard and buttons! It has been so amazing seeing their creations! We will be using these props in our pretend centers "weather station" to allow them to pretend and act out the role of a meteorologist! We also discussed the different types of weather we have here in Hawaii and created a backdrop of the islands in which the students helped label each island name. Can't wait for our center to come to life, as the students are very excited!

The week before break started, Kindergarten had fun tie dying masks and shirts! They watched a tutorial video that had different types of tie dye designs. Then, they decided which one they wanted to try. With the help of their teachers they wrapped it accordingly with rubber bands. Next, they picked their colors and had fun making the designs. The shirts turned out so awesome! The kindergartners are already asking what they can tie dye next!

Our green beans are growing! During the first week of November Ms. Mori’s class had planted some green beans in their garden bed in the back of their class. Every morning the students go outside to check on their plants, make observations, water them, and pull out any weeds they may find. When the students came back from winter break they had an exciting surprise waiting for them. Their green beans had flourished and were ready to be harvested! The students were able to harvest all of the green beans on their own and take them home to share with their families. It was a very exciting and hard working day in Kindergarten.

Please make sure to click on the following videos bellow from 1st grades's butterfly garden and also from their mini field trip to Kaiaka Park.

Mrs. Kauffman's second-grade students have recently become pen pals with another second-grade class from Louisiana. Students first developed topics to write about, learned how to address a letter with greetings and salutations, and finally developed letters. Students have loved reading letters from their pen pal and writing back to them.

Ms. Onek’s class has worked hard learning about primary and secondary colors. That background knowledge was applied to understand how colors can represent different feelings. With all of that in mind, students were introduced to different famous artists. One of the class favorites was Claude Monet. During art class, students got the chance to draw an impressionist landscape of Claude Monet’s famous Lily Pond and Bridge. Here is some of their fantastic work:

Please click on the following video to watch 3rd grade's exciting initiative on campus to reduce waste. Sage's classmates help her navigate her way through the new Zero Waste Station behind their classroom.

The #808Reads, Hawaii Reads challenge, encourages students to continue to improve their reading comprehension skills. The more reading a student does, the more opportunities they have to build important literacy skills while discovering the joys of independent reading. #HiReads offers badges that celebrate the things that come together to make Hawaiʻi a unique and wonderful place to live, learn, and grow.

Participating readers earn badges representing the diverse foods, activities, and environment in Hawaiʻi with book reviews and completing fun activities with their ʻohana, all centered around reading. All participants are also entered into a random prize drawing at the end of each challenge.

Congratulations to the following students for our Quarter 2 challenge:

• Gr. 4 - Rainier is our top reader, logging in 1710 minutes
• Gr. 2 - Zoe earned the most badges (22) during
• Gr. K - Maleko is our top lower grade reader, logging in 665 minutes
• Gr. 1 - Everest is our random drawing winner

Congratulation to the following students for our Winter Break challenge:

• Gr. 5 - Stryker is our top upper grade reader
• Gr. 2 - Justina is our top lower grade reader

Email: haleiwaschool@haleiwa.k12.hi.us
Website: haleiwaelementary.com
Phone: (808)637-8237
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/haleiwaelementary
Twitter: @HaleiwaElement1