Thank you so much to those of you who were able to join us for our Student-Led Conferences this week. It was very special to see the kids share their work with you. They were absolutely beaming with enthusiasm and pride. 

I wish you all a wonderfully restful and relaxing spring break filled with new and exciting family memories. 

Happy Spring! 

Miss Roberts

We had a wonderfully creative week together in kindergarten. Students collaborated to produce a beautiful mural that highlights some of the interesting things we have learned about animals in winter. Each student chose an animal they wanted to represent on the mural and used a collage technique to create it. They worked very diligently on these! On the following day, students wrote a sentence about the animal they created to add information to our mural. Here are a few sneak-peek pictures! Children are very excited to share the finished product with you when you're in the school for Student-Led Conferences next week.

Students have shown a great deal of interest in learning to write number sentences so we did some experimenting and exploring with that this week. We're continuing to practice the skill of counting-on when adding 2 dice together and have been using number lines to help us ensure we are recording our numbers accurately.

Classroom Reminders:

Student-Led Conferences will take place on Wednesday, March 22nd from 4:00 pm to 7:50 pm and on Thursday, March 23rd from 8:00 am to 12:50 pm. Students will not attend school on Thursday March 23 or Friday March 24th. Online booking for interviews is scheduled to begin on March 20th at 4:00 pm (although it appears that some time slots were made available earlier than that). Booking will close at 3:00 p.m. on Thursday March 23rd.

These interviews are intended as an opportunity for you and your child to share in their learning together. This is a time for your child to show off what they have been learning throughout the past term. Please plan to arrive at your interview approximately 20 minutes prior to your scheduled time so that you may share in your child's work before our interview. Please note that because the main focus of these conferences is for you to share time with your child, the interview portion will only be 10 minutes in length. This time will go very quickly! Please think about any questions you may have about your child's learning in advance :)

Looking forward to seeing you all next week!

Miss Roberts

We learned about the letter D this week. To relate this letter to something meaningful, students were introduced to the artist Salvador Dali and had a lot of fun looking at his beautifully imaginative paintings. Inspired by his amazing artwork, we decided to create some our very own Dali melting clocks. Students were quite proud of themselves. Check these out!

To continue our investigation of animals in winter, we talked about the animals that stick around for the cold winter months and how they adapt to survive. We discovered that many of these animals change color, grow extra fur and eat extra food before the cold comes. Ask your child what a ptarmigan does in the winter (they loved this). When writing about how animals adapt, students worked very hard to move their writing forward by attempting to achieve the goals they set last week. Many students tried using lower-case letters and some used spaces between their words for the first time. 

Look at these awesome animal tracks we saw right outside our door! Have a look for other prints around the neighborhood and feel free to snap a pic and share them with us :)

Have a beautiful weekend! Stay warm out there!

Miss Roberts

This week in kindergarten was all about migration! The kids are SO engaged with our investigation of animals in winter. They are coming to school each day with new facts to teach their friends and have integrated this learning into their free-choice play at center time. It's so wonderful to be a part of their enthusiasm and excitement. One of the facts we learned was that when lobsters migrate to find calmer waters, they hold onto each other and walk in a line. You should see us walking in the hallway now...we've turned into lobsters! It's adorable. We learned that there are 3 main reasons why animals migrate to a new place. Ask your child to share these with you :) 

The morning class began exploring self-assessment this week. We spent time looking at a writing continuum and talked about how the writing progresses from picture to picture. Students looked at writing examples and decided where each piece of writing fit along the continuum. After some practice with this, students looked at their own writing and decided which color best matched what their writing looks like. Finally, students created goals to work towards to move their writing forward:

"I am working towards periods and more lower-case letters."

"I am working towards using spaces between my words."

"I am working towards writing more than one sentence."

This was hard work, but the students did great. They were surprisingly accurate in their assessment of their writing and came up with meaningful writing goals. The afternoon class will tackle this next week!

We learned another new and exciting math game called Watch Out! Students are becoming more comfortable recognizing dot patterns on dice and some of our more confident learners have started using counting-on as a strategy when counting the total on 2 dice. For example, if they roll a 6 and a 4, rather than counting all of the dots starting at 1, they touch the higher die and say "6," then count the rest of the dots "6...7, 8, 9, 10." This would be a great skill for you to practice with your child at home! 

We enjoyed having a guest Squash instructor with us in gym this week! He will be joining us for our gym time again tomorrow. 

Classroom Reminders:

1. Scholastic orders are due back on Monday, March 6.

2. We had fun working through Poetry stations with our Grade 2/3 and Grade 6 buddies for Love of Reading week. The Read-A-Thon folders are due back on Thursday, March 9. Please return the folders even if you choose not to participate.