I apologize that this update is a tad late. We had a super fun week (once again!) in room 110 :) Here is a breakdown of our week :) There's quite a bit. Enjoy!
Literacy Update
This week we introduced a new activity at Literacy centres: shaving cream spelling! With just a tiny bit of shaving cream, students can practise printing their letters and spelling words in it :) As messy as it is, it's a lot of fun! Keep practicing printing those letters at home!
On Thursday, we learned about our next reading strategy-
Stretchy Snake tells us to stretch out the word by sounding it out. We've been practising this a lot during our Literacy lessons! We are becoming quite good at sounding out words!
I caught JK Lily taking the initiative to do some writing at the creative centre on Friday. She was making an animal graph and was trying to spell it out. Knowing our letters, sounds, and letter formation makes it much easier to spell tricky words Great job, Lily!
Crock a Doodle -SPOILER
On Wednesday, Tracy from Crock a Doodle came in to help us make a Christmas/Winter craft- for you! (shhh!) She showed us what we were making and students were so excited to get started! We all made a little something for your keepsakes and we hope you like them! They look amazing!!!
Tribes Update
Congratulations goes out to our 3 winners for this month's Tribes focus of "Responsibility". These students show responsibility by always bringing their important bags, doing their daily jobs, and cleaning up after themselves. Great job! For the month of December, we will be working on Collaboration :)
Learning Centre Fun
We've got lots of photos to share this week from our learning centres :) We were busy taking photos for our Monthly Writing Journal and therefore have lots! Every month, students have a picture taken of them playing at a learning centre and then they write about it. We are excited to see the growth of your child's writing over the course of the year! Enjoy the pictures :)
Reading Buddies with Mr. McCormack's Grade 5 Class!
Moustache Day!
At the very last minute, we learned that Friday was Moustache day! Some students came with them and we snapped some pics :) My apologies for not advertising it! We let students make them during learning centres if they wanted to :)
Volcano and Lava Update!
This week we painted our volcano- it looks amazing! Soon, we will be experimenting with different types of lava to decide on which one we want to use for our big experiment!
Additional Updates
On Tuesday Dec. 2nd, we have a 911 presentation. Local police officers (volunteers) will come in and teach students what to do in the event of an emergency and how to dial 911:)
Pizza money is due Dec. 11th and Scholastic orders are due the 4th!
We have our Holiday Gift shop beginning on Dec. 10th. More details to come on this soon.
For our Winter assembly, our class will be performing a song called, "I'm a Little Snowman"! We will send you details on how to dress your child, etc. soon :)
I thought I'd give you a mid-week update on some happenings in our classroom :)
Following Classroom Rules
In our classroom, we have 5 rules:
1. Respect yourself, others, and the class
2. Use your manners
3. Listening ears
4. Raise your hand to speak
5. Clean up after yourself
Miss Smith and I notice when students are following the rules, and also when they are not. Today, I was very upset to see this at one of our table activities.
As you can see, the bin was coloured on and the label was scratched. We aren't sure who did this, but we know it was this morning at the creative table during table activities. No one admitted to doing it and we still don't know. I sat down with students and explained to them how sad this made me. We talked about how these are things I make for them to use and pay for with my own money, and it really hurts my feelings to see one of our students treating our materials like this. I really hope we don't see this happen again.
All Aboard the Friend Ship!
Today we launched our "Friend Ship" theme; a tool we will use in our classroom to teach good character amongst students. We had a lot of fun introducing students to the Friend Ship. We learned that Mr. Giggles, our class mascot, was the captain of the ship, and he's going to teach us all about what being a great friend looks like. We invited all students to come on board the Friend Ship, and of course everyone was thrilled! To make them official pirates on the ship, we gave each student an eye patch. This eye patch represents their willingness to try and be the best friend they can be, with help from Mr. Giggles, Miss Smith, and myself :)
We have 5 rules on the Friend Ship (these are different from our class rules). In order to be a good friend, we must:
1. Use kind words
2. Share with our friends
3. Help our friends
4. Listen to our friends
5. Be happy for our friends
Over the next couple of months, we will be having lessons that specifically teach to these rules. What does it look and sound like to use kind words? To share? We are excited to use this theme to help teach some of these concepts :) We hope everyone is on board with learning to be a good friend, and no one is left stranded on the island!
I don't think the eye patches were very comfortable, and this may be my favourite picture yet ;)
Literacy Update
We have finished learning about Mr. H and his 4 friends! But that doesn't mean we can forget about them! This week, we've learned about /wh/ and /th/.
/wh/: Miss W and Mr. H enjoy spending time with each other, but when they’re together, Mr. H finds that Miss W does all the talking- he can’t even get a word in! Therefore you only hear the sound she makes - /w/. The only exception to this rule is the word ‘who’ where you hear Mr. H instead.
/th/ Th: Miss T and Mr. H love spending time together, but they often don’t agree on things, so they tend to get in a lot of fights. Therefore, they stick their tongues out and make the /th/ sound. With /th/, there is what we call a voiced and unvoiced /th/. A voiced /th/ uses your voice like in the words ‘that’ and ‘there’. An unvoiced /th/ just uses your breath like in the words ‘theatre’ and ‘think’.
Printing Practice
Believe it or not, teaching kids the formation of letters isn't an expectation in the Kindergarten curriculum. It does come about during the day when students are writing, but we don't necessarily sit them down and teach them how to make the letters. I would like to offer some support for you to work on printing with your child at home. If you would like a copy of a printing practice book, please send me a note. It's just rote practice of printing the letters. If you help your child with this at home, then I can spend more of my time teaching them how to use these letters to compose words instead of actually printing them. Like I said, it does come about naturally through writing, but extra practice never hurts :) Please always encourage your child to write their letters from the top down- never starting at the bottom.
We will have a competitive team rehearsal this Tuesday November 25th at 1st nutrition break. Due to conflict with the intermediate dance team, we had to switch our rehearsal to day 3's. It is imperative that you show up- we have a lot of cleaning up to do before we compete :) See you then! :)
I hope everyone had a nice day off :) Miss Smith and I got up to a lot of cleaning and organizing, and the Kindergarten team did a lot of planning together :) We're ready for a fun December!
Winter Clothing Update
This week was a little chaotic with it being our first snowfall! Dressing/Undressing 4 times a day is quite a lengthy process, but our little ones are getting into routine quickly :) Once again, please make sure all of your child's clothing is label somewhere recognizable. I see most are, which is great- thanks! :) Also, if you haven't already, please send in a pair of indoor shoes to keep at school. You can also send in extra socks incase their socks get wet from their boots, and we can build that into our routine!
Library Fun
Miss Smith took the iPad to the library this week to snap some photos of our little ones in action. Enjoy!
Going Undercover
I thought I'd post a video of students during tidy-up time so you can get an inside look. Cleaning up after ourselves is one of our classroom rules. I thought I was smart by changing the iPad's position half-way- sorry for the head cramps! I would like to post videos like this, such as during carpet time, etc. but I'm still deciding whether or not it's a good idea. I'll let it marinate for a bit, but here's one in the meantime :)
Literacy Update On Wednesday, we introduced Mr. H's second friend, Miss C! Miss C and Mr. H love the rain. They love to go for walks in the rain and play in the puddles. However, they get so excited when it starts raining that they always forget to put their rainboots and jackets on, so they always get sick. When they’re sick, they start sneezing a lot and make the /ch/ sound!
Can you think of any words that start or end with the /ch/ sound?
Anti-Bullying Week
This week was anti-bullying week, and to help Kindergarten students understand it more, we had a Drama presentation on Thursday called Cinderella and the Frog Prince. It was a quirky little performance, but the message behind the play was all about accepting people for who they are- green skinned frogs included! We will continue to work on accepting people's differences in the classroom :)
Our First Inquiry Project
As most of you may know, the new FDK program looks different from the old one. We no longer do worksheets, matching/close-ended games, pre-made themes, etc. FDK uses play as the driving force for learning. After a couple of months of observing our students during play, we've finally decided what we're going to use to delve into some more learning. Here's an example of how this happens:
1. Students play at learning centres doing whatever it is they want
2. The teachers in the classroom observe students and find out what they're interested in
3. Teachers discuss their observations and decide what students are most interested in
4. Teachers guide students through different tasks using that topic as a main focus
As you can tell, it's not completely teacher directed (ex: "We're learning about apples!") or student directed (ex: "Let's learn about xBox!"), it's the teachers and students collaborating together :) If we use a topic students are interested in, they will be more likely to participate and eager to learn. The skills and information they will learn will stick with them for a longer period of time because it had meaning behind it. It's a win-win!
Our Discovery
Through watching students play, we've noticed that the majority of students love to play the "Lava Game", where they step on blocks to avoid touching the lava (carpet). This has been an ongoing interest to our students, and Miss Smith and I thought to ourselves, "Wouldn't this be a great way to spark some inquiry?".
We thought of some really fun stuff we could do that would hit a lot of learning expectations! We could make a volcano (Visual Art) and use lava to do an experiment (Science)! We could measure the amount of lava we poured into the volcano (Math) and write down what happened (Language). Needless to say, I was pretty excited about it ;) There was so much we could do with this idea, so we wanted to start right away!
During our afternoon carpet time, we asked students if they knew where lava came from. Andrew told us it came from a volcano. Other students knew too, which shows me they have prior knowledge of volcanoes and lava. Next, we looked at some pictures online of volcanoes and lava, and the "oohs" and "ahhs" ensued :) Students were so curious about them, so we came up with some questions together as a class that we would like answered!
Those are some seriously awesome questions! We can't wait to start researching it!
Miss Smith collected some materials from home for us to make our very own volcano! As a class, we talked about what shape a volcano is (triangle/cone) and students helped her make the foundation for our volcano. Then we started to paper mache the volcano- as you can imagine, they loved this!!
Nevaeha and Lily took the initiative to draw pictures of volcanoes using all the right colours! Awesome!
This is only the start of our first inquiry, so there will be a lot more to come. We are super excited to learn more about lava and volcanoes! :)
Additional Updates
We have pushed back our Character Education theme of "All Aboard the Friend Ship" to next week :)
December calendar's will be going home early next week.
Please think about being involved in our holiday craft day :) We have 3 volunteers so far, so we only need 1 more craft! We will certainly have more crafts if there's an interest, or you could simply come in and help out :)
Please submit your pizza money for Jan-Mar ASAP- we will need to put the orders in before Christmas break.
We are planning on performing in our Winter Celebration assembly on Wednesday, December 17th if you need notice and would like to come!
We are in need of toilet paper rolls and magazines for our creative centre. Any donations would be appreciated! :)
That's all I can think of for now- have a great weekend!
