A Fun Week!!

Good evening, families!

We hope you're having a great night and are looking forward to a 3 day weekend :) (still 2 for us!). We've got lots of fun pictures and exciting things to share with you from this week. Although it was a short week (that seemed to fly by!), it was still very busy in room 110 :)

Weekly Happenings

In our last post, we mentioned the new learning centres we were opening this week. It's great to have more learning centres open so that students have more centres to choose from and each centre is a little less crowded. 

We opened our Paint centre on Wednesday and it was a huge hit! Who doesn't love to paint!? Mrs. Tortola and I went through very explicitly how to set up and clean up the Paint centre so we can keep it looking neat. I have to say, this group of students is pretty amazing at tidying up after themselves! We've been super impressed. Cleaning up after yourself is one of our rules! Here are some friends enjoying themselves at Paint :) We're just starting off with some water colours as it's easy to clean up. Soon we'll be using different kinds of paint and tools to make some really neat art projects! Nice paintings, boys and girls!

Puppets, Puzzles, and Science were also opened this week! We have some really neat puppets to play with and a brand new puppet theatre! We discussed how we can make our own plays or reenact a story we already know :) The Science centre was a lot of fun, too! We can see from the pictures below that the students were exploring different kinds of rocks and shells and were trying out the magnets! The boys and girls decided to make their own "Letter Factory" using the hollow blocks- so creative! Read more about the Letter Factory near the end of this post :)

Ahh yes, technology. Students were SO excited to finally use the computer, iPad, and SMARTboard. On the computer and SMARTboard, students can choose a game from abcya.com to play with, and on the iPad, they have certain apps they can choose from. Mrs. Tortola have chosen educational games for students to play with (so they aren't playing Flappy Bird at school ;)). We are slowly introducing 2 new apps everyday and showing students how they work. They have shown a great deal of patience! Great job!

Here are some more pictures from this week :)

Courtney was sorting the farm animals based on colour- fantastic initiative, Courtney! The boys sure seem to enjoy the lego- I don't blame them!

We also introduced the Water centre today- so much fun!

After 2nd nutrition break, we do 5 minutes of independent reading. I love seeing them all read!!

Literacy Update

• We've been watching Leapfrog's The Letter Factory to help us learn our letters and sounds. We will continue to use these characters as they really seem to click with the children. You can watch the whole video here :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzH4QjsTmwc
• Literacy Bins will begin next week! Stay tuned to the blog next week to see what these are :)
• SK DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) testing is finished. Parents will be receiving their child's DRA score shortly. JK parents will also receive an information package regarding this when Home Reading begins.

Other Updates

• We are planning a walking trip to Fortinos in October.... more to come on that later!
• Parents who volunteered to come in and talk about their hobby or occupation will be receiving some papers in their child's important bag next week
• Please remember to bring in Special Events money and Pizza Money ASAP. Late orders on Pizza will not be accepted. Thanks for bringing in cheques and exact change!

Have an amazing weekend and we will see you Monday!

~ Miss Pliura & Mrs. Tortola