Karen Coon

I recently read an article in Time magazine that really excited me for all of you parents. It is called Bedtime Math. You can google it at bedtimemath.com and it has various levels of activities following a simple story to help your child build mental math skills. It is short and sweet- you can decide how much to do on a verbal level and it is equated to the importance of reading daily to your child- but this tells us also how much we should include mathematical conversations as well. I was really excited to see this as something you can easily plug in- just look into this sight- it looks like they upload it every few days- nothing you have to come up with– but it might get you thinking about how to have more mathematical conversations so simply with your keiki! We can only get smarter!

Mahalo to all the ‘ohana who came to help us in decorating the delicious cupcakes that Uncle Ron made for us! We had fun this afternoon eating, sharing cards and making cards for our families.

Congratulations to Serenity and Kahiau for showing pilina and ho‘ihi in the month of January!

IMG 1769 from KSH Kula Ha'aha'a on Vimeo.

The keiki have really been practicing hard for our yearly speech festival. Although the finals are next week, I thought I would post a picture of each group. Most groups did poetry, with one doing wise sayings in Hawaiian and English. I was so impressed with each and every studentʻs efforts this year!

They sure looked relaxed and cozy on Thursday! Enjoy some pictures!

Since we came back to school we have begun a new activity, called Book CLubs. The keiki are in random groups of four. There is a reader, a facilitator and two listeners. The idea is to have them control their learning activity with the understanding of what to do. Enjoy listening in on one of our groups and listen to the interactions in the background as well!

IMG 1675 from KSH Kula Ha'aha'a on Vimeo.

One of the activities at school this week was hearing and responding to the story, Too Many Mangos. This is a wonderful story to teach about the gift of sharing. The keiki related to this big idea and connected it to the meaning of mahalo as well. As it turned out, I was gifted a very large papaya the night prior to this lesson and decided to share it with the students as they heard this story. The keiki also had the opportunity to try it in different ways just as the characters in the book used the mangos differently too. Enjoy some pictures of our students and their work.

Congratulations to Krista and Au‘kele for being focused learners and good friends to others during the month of December!