i told the kids that when they came back from school after christmas, it would be a new year. when i would refer to “next year” there were several kids who raised their eyebrows and scrunched their noses to tell me, “sorry, i won’t be here. i’ll be in kindergarten next year.”

one of the concepts we worked on for L week and the first week of 2009 was left and right. we arranged and rearranged the numerals 2, 0, 0, 9 several different ways. i modeled reading left to right (and then right to left…funny stuff).

one activity we did was finding one 2, two 0s, and 1 9 in the room. they were pre-cut from outdated calendars (which means each is the size of a calendar page). once each child arranged them in correct 2-0-0-9 order, we glued them on!

happy 2009! happy new year!