Students had so much fun making holiday cards for their families. There's a little bit of magic that happens when you give a 5 year old yarn, paper, glue and scissors. "This is the BEST DAY EVER!" Please know how much love went into those cards made just for you.

We learned a new number game using Power of Ten cards. These cards help students to develop their number sense and visualize number relationships to 10. With time and practice, students learn to recognize the number of colored squares on each card without having to count them. For example, if you look at one of the cards that has every square colored-in except for one, students quickly identify that as a 9, because they know that 9 is one less than 10. A card that has one side fully colored-in can be recognized as 5, because 5 is half of 10. 7 can be seen as 5 and 2 more, etc. We will use these cards for a variety of games throughout the year. 

On our last day before the break, we watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the cartoon version) and talked about the important message behind this classic story. Students loved creating their very own Grinch to take home and worked hard to master staying inside the lines when using a paintbrush. 

I wish you all a very merry holiday season filled with special family memories. 

See you back at school on Tuesday, January 3!

Miss Roberts 

Our kindergarteners drew some fabulous self-portraits this week. They practiced drawing themselves using shapes (no stick people), drawing realistic eyes (no black dots) and drawing hair without scribbling. These turned out great! 

Students worked through another math challenge: Santa was feeding his 2 favourite reindeer, Rudolf and Dancer. He had 7 carrots to give to out. How many carrots can he give to each reindeer?  Students are becoming much more confident using pictures to solve number problems. Many students even challenged themselves to find more than one solution! As always when working through math problems, students are working towards creating pictures that are simple and organized. They rocked this one! Ask your child to solve a slightly different version of this for you at home (sharing cookies, toys, etc.). 

We talked about many different ways that families celebrate at this time of the year. Students were very excited to share about their favourite holiday traditions and learned that each and every family has their own unique way of enjoying the season. We drew pictures in our journals and many students attempted writing sentences for the very first time...yippeee!!!! It was a proud teacher moment. 

We had a blast on our first field-trip adventure! Students loved the bus ride, eating lunch at the theatre, and seeing an exciting, funny, modern-day version of Cinderella. We got to sit in the front row! They were very well-behaved and totally engaged throughout the entire show. It was a fantastic trip. Thank you SO MUCH to our amazing volunteers for braving the cold to come along with us on our adventure. We could not have done it without you. 

We've turned our house center into a food store! I love seeing all the writing taking place to make signs, menus and receipts. They're also practicing their number skills by recording how much each item costs, calculating bills and providing change to their customers. So much (hidden) learning going on!

Classroom Reminders:

1. Students are invited to enjoy some carol-singing next week. Each morning from 8:25-8:40 there will be caroling taking place in the gym. Come join us! 

2. Leadership Club is collecting donations for the Drop In Center again this holiday season by supporting Fill-A-Sock.  This program provides presents on Christmas morning of practical items for our neighbors in need.  Your generous donations can be left under the Christmas tree in the Briar Hill School lobby, and will be picked up on the 15th of December - that’s next Thursday!  For a complete list of donation item suggestions, you can visit: http://www.thedi.ca/fill-a-sock-fill-a-need/.  Thank you for your kind support!

3. Next Friday, Dec. 16th will be an Early Dismissal day for the afternoon students. This will be the last day of class before our winter break! Classes will resume on Tuesday, January 3. 

Stay warm this weekend!

Miss Roberts

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