Sunday 28 December 2014

A Personal Reflection: My Learning Journey in FDK


Good evening everyone,

Today I thought I would write more of a personal blog entry about my learning journey in FDK so far this year. This year has been a huge learning curve for me and my professional learning. Having 30 students, sharing a classroom, and taking on play-based learning has challenged me in many ways. It is very natural for me both in my personal and professional life to reflect on everything I do. Is what I’m doing working? How can I do it better? I thought I would use a model we’ve been learning about in our staff meetings to reflect on my learning journey so far this year. Here are the things I would like to stop, start, and continue in my professional practice.

STOP

It was a bit difficult for me to think of things I should stop doing. Not because I think I'm doing things perfectly, of course, but because I've only started this program 4 months ago. At this moment, there are only things that I would either change or start doing

START

Implement a self-regulation model: An important part of the new FDK program is teaching students to self-regulate. Self-regulation is defined as the ability to control, maintain, and change one's level of stimulation appropriate to a task or situation. This includes regulating one's emotions and the ability to up-regulate or down-regulate based on the situation at hand. An article I found online did a nice job of explaining self-regulation as this:

"Self regulation has two sides: First, it involves the ability to control one's impulses and to stop doing something, if needed... for example, a child can resist his immediate inclinations to blurt out the answer when the teacher poses a question to another child. Second, self-regulation involves the capacity to do something (even if one doesn't want to do it) because it is needed, such as awaiting one's turn or raising one's hand. Self regulated children can delay gratification and suppress their immediate impulses enough to think ahead to the possible consequences of their actions or to consider alternative actions that would be more appropriate. While most children know that they are supposed to "use their words" instead of fighting, only children who have acquired a level of self-regulation are actually able to use them".

The thought of teaching 30 students to self-regulate seems very scary and overwhelming. However, I do see a need for this in our classroom and am working on model to help students learn to self-regulate themselves a bit more.

Amp up guided reading: One of the HWDSB's expectation according to their strategic directions is that all students are able to read by the end of Grade 1. When students leave SK, they should be at a DRA Level 4. When students enter Grade 1, they should enter at a Level 4 and leave at a Level 16. Grade 1 is the most crucial year for a child's reading development. It is where you see the biggest jump in their reading. As you can imagine, that puts an incredible amount of pressure on Kindergarten and Grade 1 teachers. I've been trying my hardest to pull small groups for guided reading every day. Not to make excuses, but it can be very challenging to even pull one small group every day. With continuous assessments taking place, daily hiccups, and other events, it's pretty tough! However, I am going to try my best to pull one group everyday, no ifs, ands, or buts. Ideally, I would like to pull two groups... one during literacy centres and one during learning centres. I will try my best. I have created a duotang for each student that we will use during guided reading that includes materials from LLI. LLI stands for Leveled Literacy Intervention which is a program most commonly used in Grade 1. Last year, I was trained in LLI and administered LLI to students in Kindergarten and Grade 1. They have kits available for both grades, therefore, I have used these materials to supplement our guided reading program.

CONTINUE

Posting on the blog: I love being able to share with you all of our adventures in our classroom. I have received wonderful feedback from all of you and I'm so glad you are enjoying it. This is my first year having my own classroom and being in one classroom full-time, so it was the perfect year for me to start blogging. My goal is to continue to post a couple of times a week with learning updates and reminders.

Putting an emphasis on Character Education: It's no surprise that teaching students good values at this age is imperative. This is something that children have been taught at a very early age, such as saying "please" and "thank you" and not hitting their friends. However, when you're put in a classroom with 29 other children of all different personalities, abilities, and coping mechanisms, it makes it a bit more challenging. One of my goals as an educator is that my students leave my class with a better sense of what being a good person entails. I really want to help build good character amongst my students and teach them positive character traits that will assist them in being well-rounded individuals. I've really enjoyed implementing our Friend Ship theme in an effort to teach positive character traits, and I'm looking forward to teaching more lessons on how to be a good person and a good friend.

On-going communication with parents: My current methods of communicating with parents include in-person conversation, phone calls, e-mails, notes, and direct messaging through twitter. I try my best to make sure you know what's going on with your child is terms of academics, behaviour, and social interactions. I've learned that something I see as minor may seem major to you as a parent, so I've made a conscious effort to let you know if something happens. Please rest assured that if I have any major concerns about your child that I would have already spoken to you about them. Students will receive their first report card in February which will provide you with more in-depth information regarding the previously mentioned topics. In the New Year, however, my goal is to communicate more often with parents of students I have concerns with academically. Please remember that if you ever have concerns about your child to please contact me at any time. Whether it's a scratch on their arm of their current reading level, I'm always available to talk. Sometimes I get so caught up with everything going on, it's better if you ask me to chat :)

Heaven knows that there are a lot of other things I would like to start and/or continue, but these are just certain things that have been on my mind that I know I can achieve within the new year (nothing worse than setting an impossible goal!). 

I hope you enjoyed reading this. Writing this and sharing it with you helps me to clear my head and set realistic goals for the New Year. I swear, my mind never stops running!

Thanks for reading,

~ Miss Pliura

Friday 19 December 2014

Friday December 19th, 2015 Update - Happy Holidays!

Hi everyone!

Today was a super fun day in Room 110 :) We got to wear our pajamas, have lots of snacks, and watch "Frozen"! Students had a great time celebrating the last day before winter break :) (I think we're all in need of it!).


Thanks to the Treat Team for bringing in some drinks and snacks! :)

Holiday Performance

Here is a video of our performance, "I'm a Little Snowman" from our assembly on Wednesday :) You all did a great job- I'm so proud of you!


Tribes Winners


This month's focus was Collaboration. The following students were chosen because they work really well in group settings and always let their classmates play with them. Congratulations you three! All students will receive an award before the end of the year :)

Additional Info/Updates

  • Snuggle Up books were kept at school over the winter break to ensure they don't get forgotten or lost. Please continue to read with your child over the winter break! 
  • Try to complete the Holiday Challenge on your December calendar and post pictures of them to twitter so I can see!
  • If you need to get a hold of me over the winter break for any reason, please send me a private message on twitter and I will get back to you at some time during that day.

I hope everyone has a wonderful and safe holiday with their families and friends. I look forward to a great start to 2015 with lots of new activities and learning :) Take care of yourselves, and I'll see you in the new year!


All the best,

Miss Pliura

Wednesday 17 December 2014

Wednesday, December 17th, 2014 Update

Good evening!

I hope everyone is doing well :) These past couple of weeks have been pretty restless in our room! I think with the holiday break coming, students are more excited than ever. A break is definitely needed!

Here's a class picture from Wednesday :)


Winter Assembly

Today was our Winter Assembly! We had so much for performing our song, "I'm a Little Snowman" for you all. Thank you for coming to watch us! Students had a great time on stage :) Students looked great and did such a good job! I loved seeing their cute outfits :) I apologize on behalf of the stage crew- I don't know why it was so dark :( But I hope you got some great pictures and videos, anyway! I know how meaningful these moments are :)

We had the other Kindergarten teachers record us, so I will get that video up ASAP. In the meantime, here are some pictures!




January Calendar

Here is January's calendar for our class. I will be away on the 8th with my Junior Dance Team. More information regarding Family Literacy day will come in the new year :)


Our Final Lava Experiment

As a class, we voted on which was our favourite type of lava. Students chose experiment #3, "Elephant's Toothpaste"! We ran out of storage on the iPad mid-way, but we were able to capture a few seconds of our volcano erupting. I love their excitement! It was so much fun :) We hope to do more science experiments in the new year!


Birthday Wishes

I was so surprised when Miss Smith and the students brought me a homemade birthday card. What an amazing card! I was so happy that I got to spend my birthday with all of my friends in our class :) Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes! Thanks for reading the card for us, Courtney!


Going Undercover - Round 2

Here is a quick video I took during tidy up time. We are trying our best to help students stay on task and do what they're supposed to do. 


Literacy Update

1. Two Walking Vowels

During our literacy lessons, we've been learning a lot about vowels. Vowels are really neat letters because they can make 2 different sounds (see Reading Package: Vowel Sounds vs. Vowel Names). When you can hear the vowel name in a word, that vowel it's getting some help from another vowel. For example, in the word 'goat', you hear the /O/ sound. You can hear the /O/ sound because there is an 'a' next to it. In the word 'home', you can hear the /O/ sound, too. In this case, the 'e' at the end is helping the 'O' say it's own name. This is really important to know when it comes to sounding out words and spelling. Vowels make their sounds in words a lot, but rarely do they do it on their own.

This week we learned that, "When 2 vowels go walkin', the 1st one does the talkin', and says its own name!". This week we learned about 'ee' and 'ea'.


When these two letters are next to each other, they will almost always make the name of the first vowel. Therefore, these letters together make the /E/ sound. So, when students are trying to sound out a word, they need to keep their eye out for what we call "2 walking vowels". Or, when they're trying to spell a word, they need to remember that if their hear the vowel name, there needs to be 2 vowels (the exception to this is in popcorn words such as he, me, etc.).


We've been practicing using our sound boxes to sound out some words together- a really great strategy! Some of our SKs don't need to use them anymore- they're noticing right off the bat that there are 2 walking vowels in a word. Awesome!

2. Popcorn Words: Round 4

We have finished going through each popcorn word and adding them to our word wall. The last round was the words that are phonetically "weird" and just need to be remembered based purely on sight. These words are: of, to, said, am, like, was, see. Continue to practice popcorn words with your child on a daily basis until they have mastered them :)

We introduced a new literacy centre today to help out with popcorn word recognition: a bean bag toss! Students have to take a word out of a bag, read it, and try to toss their bean bag on the corresponding plate. Or, a friend can read them a word without showing them and then they have to try and toss it. A fun and hands-on way to remember our 25 more important sight words :)


Fun in the Gym!

It looks like students have been having a lot of fun in the gym playing soccer! They've really enjoyed making soccer players in class using the K'nex, so it's great to see this theme happen in the gym, too! 


That's all I have for now folks. Remember that Friday is our PJ day and class party- yay!!

See you tomorrow!

~ Miss Pliura 

Saturday 13 December 2014

Delayed Friday Update! Friday, December 12th, 2014

Good evening everyone :)

I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend. Here is a brief update of our events from Friday. We had a lot of fun decorating our gingerbread house and having hot chocolate :) Enjoy!

Fire Alarm

At 1:43 on Friday Afternoon, the fire alarm was pulled. It was very unexpected, so of course students were shocked. Most students still had their outerwear on, but some students did not. When this happens, we are not allowed to get students dressed or even grab their jackets. Thankfully it was a mild day. This was the first time we didn't know the alarm was being pulled, so it was our first real practice. We were able to go back inside after 10 minutes.

Hot Chocolate!

After we came in from our fire drill, we immediately started making hot chocolate. Everyone was super excited and it tasted super yummy! Cheers!


Gingerbread House!

To practice this month's Character Trait of Collaboration, we all got a chance to help decorate our class Gingerbread House! It turned out great!!


Christmas Sweaters!

Here's a picture of students who wore their Christmas sweaters to school :) Lookin' good!


That's all for now folks! See ya Monday :)

~ Miss Pliura

Thursday 11 December 2014

Update - Thursday, December 11th, 2014

Happy Friday Eve!

I'm posting this now because I won't get a chance to post tomorrow night. Here are the highlights from our week! I hope you enjoy :)

Holiday Craft Day!

Today was Holiday Craft Day! We had 5 awesome crafts set up throughout the room and students got a chance to complete each one :) A huge thank you goes out to the parents who were able to come volunteer. We really appreciate you taking the time to set this up and help the students. There's NO way we would have been able to do it without you!! The students had such a great time :)

Here are some pictures and videos from our very special day :)













Volcano & Science Update!

Lava Experiment #2

For our second lava experiment, we used the classic pepsi and mentos experiment! Watch it happen in the video below :)


Lava Experiment #3

After a tedious time trying to upload this via our iPad, I finally got it to work ;) This experiment used yeast, dish detergent, and peroxide. It's called "Elephant's Toothpaste", and I really like the way it turned out! You can see how excited students were the second it started oozing out. 


Which one did students like the most? We will vote on Friday!!

Character Education: Problem Solving

During our character education lessons, we've been learning how to use kind words to our friends. We've learned that when we use hurtful words, it can make our friends' hearts sad. However, there will still be times when someone makes a bad decision and still chooses to use hurtful words. Today we learned what we should do in this situation, or if someone is bothering us in general. We're using the acronym WAIT to help remind us what to do :)

To model these strategies, Miss Smith and I used puppets to role-play different scenarios. We will put this up somewhere in our classroom to remind students of what to do :)

Leadership

One of my favourite parts of having a JK/SK split is seeing the leadership take place from our SKs and our JKs looking up to them. In this video, Juliette is acting as teacher and helping the JKs with their popcorn words. Warms my heart to see this :)


Interactive Writing

This week we wrote a goodbye letter to Alma! What a great, authentic way to engage students in the writing process :)


Reminders/Updates

  • Wednesday, December 17th is our Winter Celebration Assembly. Come join us in the gym at 11:20 and bring your cameras! Make sure you come through the front doors and sign in at the office. We will be busy getting ready, so if you stay for the whole assembly, you're welcome to visit your child after.
  • Thursday, December 18th is our Tribes assembly. Remember to wear your house colours!
  • Friday, December 19th is the last day of school before the winter break! It is PJ day and our Holiday Celebration. We will be having snacks and watching a movie. Please remember to contribute snacks if you are a part of this occasion's treat team (you would have received a note).
  • I will post pictures of our hot chocolate/gingerbread house on Saturday.
Have a great night!!

~ Miss Pliura

Monday 8 December 2014

Monday, December 8th, 2014 Update

Good evening everyone!

Here's an update on what we did in class today :)

Using Apples to Teach Kindness

Today I was very excited for our Character Education lesson. We are going through each rule on the Friend Ship one at a time, starting with Using Kind Words. Last week we learned that when we use hurtful words, it can hurt our friends feelings and make their hearts sad. Because students this age are so visual, I wanted to try out this lesson involving apples :)

I had 2 apples in front of me: Apple #1 and Apple #2. I told students that we were going to use nice words to the first apple. We took turns passing the apple around in a circle, saying nice things to it like, "I love your color!", "I like you", and "You're a nice apple". We handled that apple very carefully. For the second apple, we took turns being mean to it, saying mean things like "You taste funny!", "I don't like you", and "You're ugly!". Every time we said something mean to the apple, we hit it on the carpet.

Once we were done passing around both apples, we talked about what the apples looked like. They both looked the same on the outside- no noticeable changes yet. Then I took a knife and cut the apples in half. Apple #1, the one we were nice to, looked perfectly normal on the inside. When we cut Apple #2 in half, it was all brown, bruised, and squishy. This lead us to discuss that using mean words can make someone feel really bad on the inside, even if they don't show it on the outside. The idea behind this lesson is a bit abstract, in terms of relating it to how we feel, but I think students really understood what using mean words can do someone... or, some apple ;) We always have to think about what we're going to say before we say it, or we can make our friends really sad.


Later this week, we will be doing another lesson on Using Kind Words, but how to deal with it if someone says mean words to us. 

Popcorn Words: Round 3!

We've been taking our time introducing the popcorn words and adding them to our word wall. Although we've learned the song, I teach them in isolation as well. I deliver popcorn words in 4 different rounds (beginning with the least difficult to the most difficult).

Round 1: Words you can sound out: a, in, is, it, big, yes, went
Round 2: Words you can sound out using the vowel names: I, he, no, me, go, my, we
Round 3: Words that start with /th/: that, the
Round 4: Words that can't* be sounded out: like, and, of, to, can, was, said, am, see

*like, and, can, and see can be if you use more advanced decoding skills.

What it comes down to is that these words need to be memorized. Simple as that. If your child is in JK, they should know all the words up to Round 3. If your child is in SK, they should know all of them, and should be memorizing their balloon words. There are some cute videos on YouTube available to help with these. They tried their best to make them fun :D heh :) Click below for the link. Their YouTube channel has awesome songs!!


Testing out our Lava

This week, we will be experimenting with 3 different types of "lava". We tried out the first one today, which was made with dish soap, water, baking soda, and vinegar. We predicted what would happen once we added the vinegar, and of course everyone said it would explode! We will do the other 2 experiments this week, and then as a class, vote on which one we should use for our actual volcano! Check out the video below to see the experiment take place. What kid doesn't love science!?



An Unexpected Goodbye!



We are sad to say goodbye to Alma, who has moved to a different school. We've really enjoyed having her in our classroom- her smile and sense of humour will be missed!! We will write her a goodbye note this week :)

Reminders/Updates
  • Wednesday December 10th is the day our class visits the Holiday Gift Shop. If you would like your child to purchase something for themselves or for a family member, please see the note that was sent home :) We will be going at 9 am!
  • Thursday is Holiday Craft Day! Parents who are participating, please come in at 9 am- you can come in with your child in the morning. Thank you for your support :)
  • On Friday, we will be having hot chocolate and making our own gingerbread house! :)
  • Next Wednesday, December 17th is our Winter Assembly. The assembly will begin at 11:20 am and go to around 1pm. We will be the first or second up.
Have a great night!

Friday 5 December 2014

Friday Update - December 5th, 2014

Good evening everyone :)

I hope you all are enjoying your Friday night and are ready for the weekend! I can't believe it's already December. It seems like just yesterday I was meeting all of you for the first time! With the countdown to Winter break, it's been a busy week in Kinderland, and the next two weeks will be just as busy! I hope you enjoy reading about our week :)

Behind the Scenes: Independent Reading 

I took pictures of students this week during independent reading. We've encouraged students to choose a spot away from their friends so they won't be likely to chat with each other. We showed students these pictures at the end of the day for them to self-reflect on their choices.



Let's Play Dress-Up!

After MONTHS of waiting, we finally received our costumes! If you remember from an earlier post, I stated how many of you wrote that your children like to play dress up in your parent surveys, so the Kindergarten team used their fundraising money to buy these adorable costumes! We will be rotating them throughout the Kindergarten classes. Since I put the order in, I got to keep some of them first :D


Lara is doing Giulia's hair :)



Lily loved her haircut from hairdresser Izze!


Victoria is getting a trim! Don't take too much off! ;) (plastic scissors, don't worry)


I offered the girls some magazines and cappuccinos while they waited to get their hair done. Cuteness overload!!!

A glimpse of some of our other costumes, including a train engineer, a chef, a fire fighter, and a construction worker!


Guest Speaker: Physiotherapist

Today we were thrilled to have Mrs. Griffin come in and teach us about her job as a Physiotherapist! She brought in tons of really neat tools for us to look at and explained what they all did. We learned that when people are hurt, they go see people like Mrs. Griffin to get better. We learned about bones, muscles, and joints, and what they do for our body :) Thank you for joining us!


Volcano Art: Paint Blowing!

I found a really cute idea on Pinterest about using paint blowing to make lava look like it's exploding out of volcanos. It didn't work as well as we had hoped, but the products still turned out great! We kept two in our classroom to hang up in our Volcano and Lava corner :) We hope they had fun!


Tower Building

On Friday, the boys made an amazing tower that had a car ramp in the middle. Miss Smith and I were super impressed! Great job, guys!


Get Better!


We had a lot of students off sick this week. We hope that they feel better soon and can come back and play with us :)

Reminders/Updates
  • Pizza orders are due on December 11th. Remember if you don't submit it, you will miss out on 3 months of pizza!
  • Scholastic Orders for Dec. have been processed and should (hopefully) be arriving next week at some point.
  • Holiday craft day is next Thursday! We look forward to making lots of winter crafts :)
  • Thank you to those parents who keep donating toilet paper rolls- the kids use them everyday!
That's all for now! Have an awesome weekend :)

~ Miss Pliura