Christmas Cards

We love our Rancho Cucamonga Police Department, and we showed them some of that love through handmade Christmas cards this year! The students each decorated a card with paper and glitter, and then wrote and encouraging Christmas message on the back. Merry Christmas, RCPD!

Merry Christmas!

Thank you to all the families who volunteered time and supplies for our Christmas party! It was a ton of fun! We had stations for a "Pin the Jesus in the Manger" game, candy cane crafts, chocolate milk, and toilet paper snowmen! We had yummy food, sang Happy Birthday to Jesus, and even had a birthday cake! Check out the pictures to get a taste of the fun we had!

Hour of Code

Our elementary students participated in the national Hour of Code this year! To participate, we dedicated an hour of time during the week to work on coding. Follow this link to see why coding is a fun and important skill to learn: https://code.org/
We used "Pair Programming" to work on our coding skills during our work on code.org's programming activities. This means that we had to work our partner by communicating and taking turns. Here's some photos of our programmers in action!

Read A Thon

Our school hosted our annual Read-A-Thon in December. Our class raised over two thousand dollars! Wow! The money that we raise for the Read-A-Thon goes toward literacy and technology resources in our school.
The Read-A-Thon is a fun time of year, because not only do we get to spend more time reading all kinds of books, but there are also theme days to keep it interesting! Here are photos from a couple of our theme days. Thank you to the parents who volunteered their time to make reading fun!

We kicked the Read-A-Thon off by reading in a cozy spot! We brought blankets to cuddle up with while we listed to the reading of the Christmas story.

"Read in the dark" day was one of our favorites!

Prayer before reading

Thank you to all the moms, dads, and grandparents who came to read!

And an extra "Thank you!" to the Washa family for reading and then donating this book (and accompanying teacher tiara) to our class!

Precipitation

In December, our science unit was all about weather. We did a fun little science demonstration to help us understand how and why it rains. In our demonstration, the shaving cream represented clouds, and the blue food coloring represents more water being added to the clouds. When the clouds reach a saturation point with water, the clouds become too heavy with water and the water falls as water droplets!

Thanksgiving!

Every year at UCA, we have a fantastic Thanksgiving Feast! It's a tradition that we all look forward to  every fall. In the primary elementary classes, as the feast is approaching we prepare by making keepsake placemats and fun hats. This year, our first graders made silly turkey hats and woven placemats. We were in the midst of learning about how life was like long ago when Pilgrims came to America, so weaving was a fun way to incorporate some of what we were learning with our Thanksgiving celebration. In addition, we got to practice some pretty challenging fine motor skills!

My little turkeys!

Thank you to IMPACT and all the volunteers for serving us a yummy Thanksgiving feast!