This week in kindergarten, we focused on the letter G. Most students think that this letter makes a /j/ sound, and although it occasionally does, I encourage students to remember the hard G sound, as in grass or gorilla. We read the story, The Giving Tree and reflected on how this story made us feel. Many students interpreted the story as a happy one about giving and friendship. Others thought it was a sad story. We learned that it's ok to have different opinions than our friends and embraced everyone's thoughtful ideas. 

Students were excited to create their own giving trees with watercolour paints. We learned a new painting technique that allowed the different colours of paint to flow together for our backgrounds. On the following day, we drew our trees with watercolour pencil crayons and added the leaves to our trees as a finishing touch. We learned how to draw super simple realistic trees using the letter Y. Ask your child to show you how to draw a Y tree! Our finished artwork is absolutely beautiful! Students were quite impressed with themselves. 

Our pumpkin plants have continued to flourish! We drew a second sketch of how our plants are progressing and compared it to our previous sketch. Students are becoming much more comfortable sounding out words on their own and are developing greater independence in their writing. 

We practice our number skills each and every day when we add a new number to our calendar. I usually mix-up a few of the numbers, put some upside-down or take some of the numbers off. Students search for and fix the mistakes they see. I also challenge students to try and think of different number combinations that add up to the date. For example,  6 can be made with 5 and 1, 4 and 2, 3 and 3, etc. These are early addition skills that we will continue to build upon throughout the year. 

Thank you all for making time to come and discuss your child's learning this week. I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with each and every one of you. 

Classroom Reminders:

1. FIELD TRIP! Please be aware that kindergarten school hours on the day of our field trip, Thursday December 8th, will be modified. BOTH morning and afternoon students need to be dropped off at school at 10:00am and picked up from school at 2:30pm. For the field trip day only, we will need afternoon students to line-up at their dismissal doors so that both classes can enter into the school together. Your child will need to bring a full lunch. Please pick up your child from the classroom between 2:25 and 2:30.

2. Students are loving gymnastics! We have one more week to explore the gymnastics equipment in the gym. 

Have a beautiful weekend!

Miss Roberts