PreK Monkeys - Mrs. Eastwood 

The PreK Monkeys cultivated thankfulness with classroom activities geared around the fall season during November. One of our favorite science experiments involved making hypotheses about what fall items would sink or float. We also made beautiful autumn tree paintings which will be on display at the Fine Arts Night display. For December, we will be celebrating the birth of Jesus each week with crafts and activities full of jingle bells, pom poms, and lots of singing!

PreK Butterflies - Mrs. Peek

In the month of November we had fun learning about different community helpers. We made community helper hats, created our own stamps and acted out being a mail delivery person. These fun activities along with other hands on projects and great theme based books made the idea of a community helper come alive for the kiddos! The month of December will be filled with crafts, stories, and hands on activities that will help us learn about the difference between needs and wants, along with the true meaning of Christmas!!

Kindergarten - Mrs. Calton, Mrs. Collins, and Mrs. Puckett

November was BUSY for Kinder Classes! We learned about the Pilgrims and Indians and explored what it must have been like to be a Pilgrim by eating dried beef.... they all loved it so much! We enjoyed crafting, preparing for our concert, and working alongside our friends practicing teamwork.

December will be just as busy as we prepare for our concert and also for our Grandparent’s Day preparation. In amongst all the craziness we will enjoy science experiments with candy canes, Christmas crafts, learning new concepts, but most importantly we will be learning about the birth of Christ and what He did for us so long ago.

P.E. 1st - 5th grades - Mrs. Morrison and Mrs. Miller

Wow has November flown by! We ended our volleyball unit with serving and reviewing passing and setting. The younger grades enjoyed volleyball with balloons! The older grades practiced serving by playing Clean Your Yard where you try and have the least number of volleyballs on your side of the gym by serving them. Next we played Four Way Soccer to review some skills that we learned at the beginning of the school year. We ended November by beginning our basketball unit with dribbling games.

In December we will continue our basketball unit with passing and shooting. We try to make learning the fundamentals fun by doing them in stations. In December we will also make time for some games like Battleship, Save the Forrest and Guard the Castle. These types of games allow for practice in throwing, catching and team work. As always thank you for sharing your kids with us!

Science 1st and 2nd grade - Mrs. Skinner

Hello DHA families! In November we explored as many biomes as we could. Students moved through centers and had fun doing a few experiments pertaining to the arctic, wetlands, and deserts. We discussed our habitat/biome dioramas every week and looked at examples of some neat boxes online. I hope you and your family were able to have fun making one. I’m excited to see everyone’s project on the fourth!

The last few weeks of 2018 at DHA, first and second grade science classes will be exploring science through Christmas themed experiments.

Intermediate Science - Mrs. Champ

In November, Intermediate Science finished learning about rocks and minerals by completing an activity with regular Hershey Kisses and Hershey Kisses with almonds. The Hershey Kiss with almonds represented a rock, because it is made up of 2 or more minerals and the regular Hershey Kiss represented a mineral. From the outside, both Kisses looked them same, it was only when the students bit into them that they could tell a difference.

Then we started learning about sound. We played telephone (we didn’t have many sentences that were the same by the end!) and learned that because whispers are very soft noises, they are difficult to hear. We also made some paper cup telephones and learned that sound waves made the cup base vibrate, those vibrations passed along the string from one cup to the other, the vibrations from the string made the cup base vibrate and that those vibrations made sound waves in the air that passed to the ear. We have several more sound activities that we will do to end November.

In December we will learn about electricity.

Music 1st-5th grades - Mrs. Scholes

In 1st-5th grade music we worked so hard on all of our Christmas concert music all month long. The kids diligently memorized, learned motions, and talked about why the songs we are singing are important. I’m so proud of them! In December we will enjoy the fruits of our labor with our concert on December 4. We can’t wait to share that with all of our families!

The last two weeks of the month we will have fun celebrating all of our hard work for the semester with Christmas games and singing our favorite Christmas songs, and maybe even some fun dancing to Christmas music!

Journalism/Newspaper - Mrs. Swick

In the month of November, students enjoyed getting their groups established, mapping out ideas for the December edition of the online paper, and drafting some articles, comics, advice columns, and more. They created press badges to give them exclusive interview access to teachers and students in school. And these last couple weeks of December, they will edit drafts, perform interviews, and hopefully publish the first edition of the newspaper! Stay tuned. I can’t wait for you to see what they’ve been working on.

Computers - Mrs. Hodgson

This month has gone quickly! The kids have have continued to work on journals and typing. They also enjoyed playing Kahoot!, which was a fun way of practicing navigating a website. The students have the procedures and computer safety down, so we will be moving on to learning about safe searches and internet researching skills. I will be sending home an information sheet on how to access the students journals. They will be able to work on them at home if they didn't get to finish or if they want to add more. Look for this information to come home on Tuesday.

Intermediate Art 3rd-5th grades - Mrs. Hudson

Intermediate Art students have spent the month of November working with Cityscapes. Each grade level worked on a different perspective (birds eye view, one-point, or two point perspective). December we will be focusing on creating Art that focuses on Christ. We will look at visual story telling and using symbolism to express an idea.

Art 6th-9th grades - Mr. Voyles

In November, we continued working on our implied line drawings. We took a brief break from this complex project we will be continuing it in a few weeks. We had planned to do a still life drawing in November, however, as time would have it we will have to postpone that project. Currently, we are planning to continue it in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we began another drawing project. The students were given a choice to draw themselves or a friend. We discussed proper anatomical proportions of the face and how to begin to draw a portrait or likeness. We also added a design element for a background around the portraits to create a kind of "framing". Ideas and concepts for this were carried over from our previous project. Because of our snow day, we only had only two weeks to work on this project, but we will be displaying them in the December art show.

Social Studies 1st and 2nd grade - Mrs. Messer

During the month of November our classes studied how the First Thanksgiving came to be. We tried Indian ice cream, played marbles, ate hardtack and drank swizzle! Just like the pilgrims and Native Americans did! I hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving! 

Social Studes 1st and 2nd grade - Mr. Hale

We have been learning about early America leading to Thanksgiving. Till the end of semester we will be learning about Christmas around the World. We will be looking at a couple countries each week, and how Christmas is celebrated in those countries, along with their holiday traditions. 

Spanish 1st and 2nd grade - Mrs. Hesman

In November we learned family members and some common Thanksgiving foods, especially turkey (el pavo) and potatoes (las papas). We always continue practicing colors and counting and reviewing past learning.

In December we will learn Christmas vocabulary, starting with a guided "How to Draw a Reindeer" activity, with step-by-step directions primarily in Spanish! We will learn other Christmas related vocabulary throughout the month, and learn about the Mexican tradition of Las Posadas "The Inns" (Mary and Joseph's search for lodging in Bethlehem). Cheetahs and Pandas will also spend some time working on their carol, "Rockin' Around the Chrismas Tree", for Cookies and Carols/Grandparent's Day Dec. 18th. Bendiciones para ti y para tu familia! (Blessings to you and your family)

Spanish 4th - 9th grades - Mrs. Mitchell

Señora Mitchell here, reporting on our 4th -9th grade students! We had a wonderful November learning many new things about Spanish! We had a blast learning about the small, but lovely country of Panama and hearing about it first-hand from missionary Emily Puckett while she was visiting. She was able to spend a large part of the day in my class and as a result got to answer lots of questions and share some more in-depth information with my students. For Thanksgiving I gave the students printouts of turkeys with numbered feathers for them to color. They would then translate a question with the corresponding number and their answer would dictate what colors they would use for all of the feathers. We ended up with some beautiful and vibrant turkeys and it gave us a great opportunity to talk about what we were thankful for and to learn a bit more about each other. We also covered days of the week/months of the year and continued with conjugating. In the month of December we will learn about irregular verbs and sentence forming and will look at the country and culture of Spain. I hope to get much accomplished with my students and to push them ever closer to beginning to speak Spanish!