Jr. Dance Team: Arts Night Information

This post is for members of my Junior Dance team. Please see me to receive your own copy of this. Payment for accessories is due Wednesday, May 13th. You can bring it to my classroom, or during practice.

Special Events: Our Last Time with Treasa!

Today was our last session with Treasa. We were very fortunate to have her come join us and share her talents with us! We will miss her greatly. Here are some fun videos and pictures from our last session with her :)

Junior Dance Team: May Schedule

Hello fellow dancers!

Here is May's schedule. We've got a lot of practising to do to ensure we are ready for our big performances! Make sure you pick up a copy of your schedule near the Jr. Dance Info. Board. 

Practices coming up are the most important practices of all. Attendance is mandatory during the school day, and highly recommended after school. When you don't show up, you let the rest of the team down.

May Calendar

Here is May's calendar. Everyone received a copy of it today. Mighty Music forms will go home shortly. I will have a separate post about Arts Night soon! :)

Special Events: April Tribe's Winners!

A big congratulations goes out to Carter and Nathan who won the award for "Conflict Resolution". Way to go! :) Keep using those problem solving strategies!!

SK Grad Photos!

SK Graduation Photos are coming up! They are completely optional. They will take place on the morning of Thursday, May 7th, 2015. Please do not send money on this day. Proofs will be given to you after. You do not need to send the form back in that asks for students name. Thanks!

Book Fair!

We currently have our Scholastic Book Fair set up in the library. We will be going to preview the fair on Wednesday, April 29th. Students will receive a wish list that they can mark on, and it will be sent home on Wednesday for you to see. We are scheduled to go buy books from the book fair on Thursday, April 30th at 9:50 am. Please send money in the morning with your child, OR you can purchase items at night during our Open House :)

Open House Reminder

Parents and Guardians,

Open House is this Thursday, April 30th from 5-7 pm. Food trucks will be on site.

Just a friendly reminder that Open House is an opportunity for your child to show you their classroom and all of their hard work. This is not a time for parent/teacher interviews. Please understand that I may have upwards of 30 families to greet, and that any specific questions pertaining to your child should be addressed at another time. Thank you for your understanding. 

Making Numbers!

I wanted to post this video that I took earlier this week. One of our table activities is finding dominoes that make up a certain number. It was really neat to see how quickly some students could tell us the different ways to make numbers. I realize I don't talk a lot about math on here (not to downplay its significance, but it's less important than literacy at this age), but here's an example of composing numbers. How many ways can you think of to make ten? Could you use dominoes or dice? Why or why not? Are there more ways to make bigger number than smaller numbers? So many questions!!!

Mini Picture Post!

Here are some pictures from this past week :)

Special Events: Twin Day!

This past Friday was twin day! Here are some pictures :) I love how everyone had their arms around each other or were holding hands, they did that all on their own... what a great sense of family in our classroom :)

Quadruplets!

Real life twins, Andrew and Lily!

Triplets!

Rocking the white shirt and jeans :)

The Kindergarten team :)

Literacy: Printing Improvement

Look at the difference in our writing from September to now- wow!! Keep practising that printing at home :)

September 2014

April 2015

Special Events: Earth Day!

Wednesday was Earth Day! Unfortunately, the weather made it difficult for us to get outside and take care of the Earth, so we decided to do some things in the classroom to help! :) We've been reading books all week about how to take care of our environment! Here are some ways we help out in our classroom :)

Literacy: Making Connections

Watch my video below to understand what it means to make connections while we're reading :)

Special Events: A Visit from an Optometrist!

I meant to upload this last week! We had a visit from Dr. Wells, who is Mrs. Nighswander's sister! She is an optometrist! She taught us what we need to do to take care of our eyes: eat healthy foods (spinach and kale, anyone?), wear sunglasses, see your eye doctor regularly, and... don't smoke! :D

Character Education: Learning to Self-Regulate

Today we continued our learning on our "engine" levels. We reminded ourselves of what it looks like when our engines are running too high or too low. Now that we can recognize how fast our engine is running, we needed to learn how to alter it to get it to "just right". The theory behind altering our engine levels is by using our five senses. Of course, we couldn't include all of them, but this is what I've come up with :) I've created 2 bins to help students get to "just right".

The first is called the "Calm Down Bin", and it's filled with all kinds of things that will help us chill out a bit :) It includes the following:

• a soft teddy bear (to cuddle with)
• pad of paper and crayons (to relax and draw a picture)
• squeeze toy (balloon filled with sand, to get out any aggression)
• lavender-scented rice with gems (evoke our senses)
• mini windmill toy (blow out any excess energy) 
• glitter 'calm down' jar (shake it to get out any excess energy and watch the glitter settle)

The next one is called the "Rev Up Bin", and it's filled with a couple of things students can do to help peak their energy. Unfortunately we couldn't include pixie sticks or redbull, so this is what I came up with :D

• coffee grounds (no, not to eat, but to smell... it works!)
• paddle ball (to help us concentrate and get us moving a bit)
• the game "Perfection" (to wake us up a bit!) 

It was hard to think of things to put in the "rev up" bin, so if you have any suggestions, let me know! However, we feel as though students will most likely be needing the calm down bin, because engines tend to run pretty high in our classroom :\

The end goal is to have students understand what level their engine is running at and take the necessary steps to get them to "just right". However, we think it's probably more realistic to have students simply identify what level their engine is running at, and proceed to the right bin when directed by an adult. Maybe next year we can hope for that, but seeing as how it's the end of the year, we might not have enough time to get to that! We also reinforced that we shouldn't act like we're at a certain engine level just to go to a certain bin... we had some sleepy eyes after our lesson :P Feel free to use any of this language at home :) Some students are able to self-regulate better than others, and that depends on many external factors, but knowing the language and being "self-aware" is always a good thing!

Calendar Correction

 Our Tribes assembly is taking place this Wednesday, April 22nd instead of Thursday, April 30th so that is falls on Earth Day. Our Tribes activity is participating in the Tim Horton's clean up. Sorry for any confusion!

Special Events: Heritage Day!

I'm so excited to share with you all of our fun events from Friday's Heritage Day :) We had a great turn out of students dressed in their flag's colours, a lot of yummy food to taste, and a fun parade to top it all off :) We even had a visit from Mr. Torrens and Mrs. Sweeting! It was a great day to celebrate our current learning of the world :)

We had so many different nationalities in our room, including Italy, Serbia, Macedonia, Canada, Laos, Egypt, Scotland, The Philippines, Equador, Poland, Germany, United States, Afghanistan, and Lithuania! What a diverse group! It's awesome to see everyone so proud of their roots :)

We started our day off with pictures of each child representing their country with a flag or artifact :)

Team Italy!

Unfortunately Izze couldn't join us today, but we were so thrilled to receive this picture! I love it! Feel better sweetheart!

We had some pretty fabric and multicultural costume to dress up in as well!

We also had the opportunity to make our own flags to represent our country.

For our Literacy lesson, we did some interactive writing to ask Mr. Torrens and Mrs. Sweeting to come visit us for our Heritage Day party :) Who knew popcorn and balloon words would make up almost the entire sentence! ;) We also used our sounds to help us spell unfamiliar words (minus 'heritage' and words in my printing!)

After 1st nutrition break, Miss Smith read us a book called "Whoever We Are", a book about people and their different nationalities, and then we got into a circle to share about our home country :)

We captured some videos of students sharing who had brought flags or artifacts in :)

We arranged students by continent to see who came from where! :)

We watched one of my favourite videos to celebrate different countries and different people, "Dancing Matt". We learned that Matt was given the opportunity to travel all throughout the world, and even though he couldn't communicate with everyone he met, there was one thing they could connect through with the language barrier: dance! Matt's dancing is very silly, but I was so pleased with the reaction from our friends. I showed this once to a grade 1 class and they laughed throughout the entire thing, but our students were so engaged, shouting out the countries they knew. Wow! This video almost brings tears to my eyes :) I just love it.

Now it was time to taste some different foods from around the world- yum!

It was then time for us to go on our parade!! We were so proud to show off our costumes to all of the Kindergarten classes :)

That was a doozy of a post! I really hope you enjoyed a glimpse into our very special day. Thank you for all of you for your participation!! The kids had a great time :)