Catholic Schools Week Day 1

This week is by far my favorite week of the school year- Catholic Schools Week! For those of you who don't know, Catholic Schools Week is an entire week of fun activities dedicated to celebrating attending a Catholic School. Each day we have at least one fun activity planned that is outside the norm.

 

This year's theme for CSW is "Raise the Standards". Throughout this week, students are being asked to find a way to "raise" their academic standards while always keeping our faith as our highest focus (hence the cross being the tallest in the graph). Today's activities were mostly just prep work for the other days that are coming up or the beginning of week long activities that we will be participating in. Here are a few of the activities we did:

1. Penny Wars- Each class has a jar located on a table outside the principal's office. At the beginning of each day, students are asked to bring in their pennies to put in their class jar. Silver coins can be put in other class' jars and will count as negative points. So for example, if a fifth grade class had a lot of pennies, we could put in a quarter to give them -25 points. Our class was in the lead but then we had a lot of silver coins put into our jar- so sad. Who puts silver (negative) coins in a kindergarten jar!?

2. Teacher trivia- each day the secretary will make an announcement in the beginning of the day with one interesting fact about a teacher. The students will make a guess as a class about which teacher the fact belongs to. The correct answer is announced at the end of the day. I found out that one of our teachers grew up down the street from Elvis Presley! Who, by the way, none of my kindergartners knew!

3. Prep-work for vocabulary parade- Today we met with our prayer partners to complete the prep work for our school wide vocabulary parade. Tomorrow morning each student will come in to school dressed up to represent a vocabulary word. For example, some of my girls will dress up as princesses to represent the word "royal". Today we met with our prayer partners so they could help us make signs to wear that display our vocabulary word. I can't wait to post pics tomorrow!!

4. Writing prompt for bulletin board- Each of my students had to come up with one goal they had for the rest of the school year. In order to "raise" their standards, I asked them to think of one thing they would like to improve on between now and the end of the school year. I plan on putting up their writing on our bulletin board tomorrow and taking a pic to share.

Tomorrow we have our teacher luncheon ( a full hour with no students where the teachers finally get to relax together and chit chat about non-school related things.. can you see why this is my favorite week of the year?!) and our vocabulary parade- yay!