Each week in kindergarten, we will highlight one letter to help us practice letter formation and become more confident with letter/sound relationships. This week we learned about the letter P. Children practiced printing this letter in their fancy new artist sketchbooks and drew pictures of things that begin with this sound. See if you can find any items around the house (or the kitchen) that begin with the letter P! 

P is for PLANTS! And painting! This was a very popular new centre this week. We're learning to sketch, look closely and be inspired by things that we see. The morning class discovered a very special friend making a home of our beautiful plants. The mixed-media artwork the kiddos produced here was stunning! 

 

 

We spent time this week talking about how each family is unique! Children were so proud to share about their own special family and drew pictures of what each family member looks like. Our expertise with drawing shapes has helped us to progress beyond drawing stick people! Yaaaay!!! Some of our kiddos even attempted to add letters to their drawing as a way of identifying each family member. 

This week we celebrated the many diverse and beautiful skin tones we have in our room. We discovered that no two friends have the exact same skin colour. Each and every one of us has our own special shade. We read The Skin You're In and The Colours of Us and the children had an opportunity to give their unique skin colour a name. The incredible ideas ranged from "Peach Summer" and "Golden Fudge," to "Power Ranger Red" and "Rosy Pink." Ask your child what they named their beautiful skin! 

This week was truly a gift! The children are officially at home in their new kindergarten space. The magic has begun!

Have a wonderful weekend everyone! Mrs. Planden will be in on Monday next week. I'll see you all on Tuesday!

Love,

Miss Roberts

💛

This colour-mixing centre just won't quit...

Here's a math update from Mrs. Planden:

What a privilege to be learning alongside our Briar Hill kinders! It was so fun to see our students so interested and engaged in this week's math activities. We put out math centres for the first time this week, with each activity geared towards enhancing an area or multiple areas of numeracy development. A preview of a few of these centres can be found in the photos below.

 

We also put out a larger centre that we hope to be a collaborative natural centre in which the question was posed, "What can be counted?".  Several tree cookies and pine cones were set out with magnifying glasses to invite the kids to take a closer look and to examine features that might be counted. As a whole group, the ideas offered were that of the tree rings in the tree cookies and the individual 'spikes' on the pine cones. We discussed what tree rings represented, and how scientists can date a tree by counting the rings, in addition to being able to make observations about what kind of conditions the tree encountered in a given year depending on how wide the space was in between the rings. We also learned about the insides of a tree, including some pretty complex vocabulary I'm hoping you might have heard around the dinner table!

We have asked the kids to be thinking about other things they discover in nature this week that might be able to be counted -- and to bring those things physically in to add to our table or perhaps to just bring in their ideas!

Classroom Info and Reminders:

1. We're still looking for about 10 more tin cans. Keep 'em coming! Thank you so much for all of the cans sent in so far :)

Hello friends and families, 

Did you know that September 15th is known as International Dot Day?! It's a day to encourage us all to embrace our creativity and see where it takes us! We had so much fun celebrating this fun occasion together. We started our day by reading Peter Reynold's book, The Dot, learned about an incredible artist named Yayoi Kusama (who happens to reeeeally love dots) and created some collaborative dot art of our own! We even added dots to our ever-evolving house!

     

This project gave me a great opportunity to check-in and see how our new friends are doing with their scissor skills. Some of us are experts and some of us are beginners. Kindergarten is a great place to practice! Try out some scissor activities at home this weekend.


Drawing is an important way we communicate our ideas in kindergarten. This week we learned that artists use shapes as a starting point when they draw. The children collaborated to turn each of these simple shapes into a picture by adding details to it. We even worked as a team to add some beginning letter sounds to the pictures we had drawn. 

 

    

Inspired by the fantastic picture book, Perfectly Norman, we began talking about what it is that makes each of us unique. Norman had a magnificent set of wings that he felt he needed to hide because he feared he would be judged. We're learning that the things that make us unique are often the things that are most special about us. Our differences should be celebrated! In honour of Norman and his incredible superpower, we each painted ourselves with magnificent wings. I asked each child, "What is YOUR superpower?" and they had no trouble coming up with a multitude of answers.

"My superpowers are playing soccer when everyone is watching me and doing big girl monkey bars close to my house."

"I'm super because I have super strength AND super cheetah speed on my bike."

We also spent time this week exploring letters through play and enjoyed some new classroom centres. 

 

 

  

Each class has music with Mr. Cooper once per week. The kiddos are always excited to hear that it's music day :)

Have a wonderful weekend! I'll see you all on Monday. Mrs. Planden will be working Tuesday next week.

Love,

Miss Roberts 

💖

Please see the following note from Mrs. Planden…

In math this week, students were introduced to their Math Journals. Their math journals will be a dynamic place to store everything related to their studies of numbers! They will use their math journals to explore and express their mathematical thinking in written form using pictures, numbers and sometimes even words! It will also be a place for the kids to develop their problem solving skills.

Our first math journal entry was a whole group activity that involved drawing a set of objects (we chose ladybugs!) that corresponded with a numeral. We worked with the numbers 1-5 and the kids had the chance to practice their number formations, drawing and counting skills as well as 1-to-1 correspondence (counting items only once). We also added the remaining 5 beads to our 'pipe cleaner abacus' that we made last week in order to form the number 10. We will continue to use these manipulatives to assist our counting skills (forward and backward), developing the concepts of using 10 as an important marker and for separating numbers into different sets. 

Next week, we will work on numeracy centres, different counting strategies and counting on and back from a given number. (....6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

Thank you for all of your support reinforcing these important numeracy skills at home!

Mrs. Planden

Classroom Info and Reminders

 

1. We're still collecting tin cans (that don't have sharp edges) and clear egg cartons. 




2. There will be no school for morning or afternoon kindergarten next Friday, September 25th due to parent teacher interviews. 

3. Take a look at this very special kindergarten library card opportunity: