Growing Together

Our first week back was wonderful! It is always so great to hear about stories from the summer and to get to know our new students. This year, we also welcome Jean Requena to the team, as well as having our student volunteers Olivia, Joshua and Marlena back at Seeds.

Readings for the Week

The readings listed below are optional, but are great ways to reinforce the lessons taught at the center and for the entire family to explore together the topics we cover from week to week.

Window on the World

pp. 4-5 (Introduction)
pp. 198-199 (Christianity)

The Garden

All of us are so excited to start off this new year, as we welcome our new students, Lucas, Estela, Gillian and Cesare. We had loads of fun with activities and getting to know each other this week.

We began the year, as always, introducing our time of worship to God, and we did so by learning about the days of creation, teaching the children our ‘En el Principio’ song.

We then played in the park, climbed on all the equipment and got to use our boots and umbrellas on a very rainy day. While we were on our rainy day walk, the children came across many butterflies, ran after them and even tried catching some of them. The children also got to shoot some hoops with assistant Emma and they loved it.

For activity time, they learned how to use the markers correctly as Mrs. Vivi taught them to wait for the click sound.

The kids very much enjoyed playing with blocks and building together. Mrs. Vivi told them to make sure they were building with strong foundations. “Ahora no se cae, lo reforcé”, said Gillian. “Voy hacer un castillo”, said Lucas, and he proceeded to build an amazing castle. When they were half-way to finishing their creations, we gave the children our wooden people figures, and an excited Estela exclaimed, “There’s a lot of persons!”.

Needless to say, the new Garden children had a great time meeting their new friends, teachers and playing at their new school.

The Seeds Program

SEEDS Geography

This year's topic is Exploring Countries and Cultures in our Geography class and we've already started with a lot of fun activities! Unlike other years where our "time machine" helped us learn about events in the past, this year we will be traveling around the world to learn about the places and people that make up God's beautiful Earth. We began learning about the difference between maps and globes and how to read them and identifying the 7 continents. Here's a song that we used in class to help us remember their order from biggest to smallest. To watch the video, click on the Youtube link. As we continue through this year, we will add information to our class binders about the countries within each of these continents. So get your passports ready for a great adventure this year in Seeds Geography class.

SEEDS Science

We had a great start to science! We introduced several new terms that we will build upon throughout the year.

Our primary focus this year will be on the biosphere, the parts of the earth that include living things. The biosphere occupies the geosphere (the earth’s land), hydrosphere (water), and atmosphere (air).

Living organisms dwell in a natural home or environment known as a habitat. Ecology is the study of these plants and animals and this environment in which they live. They are all interconnected and all have a niche, a special role or job within their specific population or community.

Ecosystems include all the biotic (living) and abiotic (nonliving) things in a particular area that are interacting.

Biomes encompass many ecosystems in a large area with a specific climate. The student learned that climate is the average weather conditions in a region, including the amount of sunlight, average temperature, and amount of moisture. Each biome also has specific flora (plants) and fauna (animals) living within it.

If you get a chance, ask your student to tell you how they remember the difference between flora and fauna. :-)

SEEDS Studio

We had a great time reconnecting during Studio Time this week. The children shared some of their summer adventures and favorite things to do so that our new assistant Jean could get to know them better as well. Then they worked on some personalized labels and drawings to decorate their binders this year. On Friday, we began to discuss several ideas for the names of their groups but this week we will continue sharing ideas and making a final decision. We look forward to sharing those with you soon.

OAKS MIDDLE YEARS

OAKS Worship and Geography

We were so excited to welcome our new OAKS to the program this week, brother and sister duo, Channeliz and Judah! In fact Judah won the first challenge game to determine what our special treat would be for Thursday's class. This was really important because Thursday was the day we jumped head first into our theme of the year: prayer and missions!

Beginning with the scripture in Luke 24, we saw how the witnessed living Jesus, by the women, his disciples on the Emmaus road and in the upper room, motivated them, along with the Holy Spirit to share the good news with the world that truly Christ had risen! This is the same message that missionaries today take all over the world.

So for their first mission, the group was divided into two teams to gather information about our neighborhood in order to begin praying for the homes in our community. The teams were equipped with maps, instructions for documenting information and made it back to the center safely and ready to pray.

It's so cool to see the way our time of worship and our study of missions and geography are going to flow so seamlessly this year.

We also had the privilege of listening to Anaiah share about her missions experience in the Dominican Republic this summer. To check out the interview on our first episode of the new season of Compass to Christ, click here.

OAKS Science

During Science, the Oaks students received the book Properties of Ecosystems. We looked through it and discussed how we are going to use the book this year. The students will be working in a more independent way by pre reading at home the selection of what will be discussed in class. They can then come with their questions and comments and we can go deeper with our activities in class. Throughout the year, we will work on note taking and good study habits.

This week, we learned that ecology is the study of the animals and plants that live in a particular environment. We reviewed what a habitat was and gave examples of living(biotic) and nonliving (abiotic) things that we see in Creation. We also discussed how God had perfectly created the Earth to be the only planet with a known biosphere consisting of all the living things that are found in the land (geosphere) sky (atmosphere) and water (hydrosphere). We also learned about biogeographical regions or ecozones that are determined by major bodies of water and desert or mountain ranges that prevent animals from moving to a different zone. We began to label those on our first student sheet of the year and will finish it on Tuesday.

OAKS STUDIO

The Oaks students were also invited to personalize their binders and decorate their own labels and back covers. They got to work right away and some of them even took their papers home and decided to do it there and bring it back on Thursday. They will have more time to finish them this week.