Dear Green Room Families,

This week, we began highlighting different festivals of lights during December. We started with learning about Kwanzaa, which celebrates shared beliefs of African and African American families. Kwanzaa heralds the end of harvest and the start of a new planting season, and translates to “the first fruits” in Swahili.

We read Seven Candles For Kwanzaa by Andrea Pinkney and Seedling’s book Kwanzaa by Lori Dittmer. The children made beautiful kinaras, which are wooden candle holders with seven candles (one black, three red and three green). The class made their own kinaras using construction paper, glue and glitter.

We learned about each day of Kwanzaa and their core beliefs, which are called the Seven Principles, including family, unity and creativity. Families gather, drink from a unity cup and make and exchange gifts with each other. The children enjoyed painting unity cups and making colorfully vibrant bracelets and necklaces to give to each other and loved ones.

We enjoyed learning about this joyous holiday and look forward to learning about other festivals of lights, such as Christmas and Hanukkah, in coming weeks!

Warm hot chocolate regards,

Teachers Nancy & Karla 💚

REMINDERS:

Dec 17th Pajama Pancake Party (Kids only) 11:45 am More details to come

Dec. 18th: Winter Sing student call time 4:30 pm please bring your child into the Green Room. Show to begin promptly at 5pm We will be sending another reminder closer to the date. 

We also continue collecting aluminum cans and plastic bottles for our Service Learning project. Collection day is on Mondays.

Dec 19th Winter Break begins.