We have been diving into the wonderful world of storytelling over the past few weeks. Students are creating characters and magical worlds, acting out imaginary adventures and developing a sense of what is involved in developing an interesting story. 

This week, children learned to invent a character, develop a challenge for their character to overcome and find a solution to help their character resolve the challenge. Students started with drawings, added some writing and then had an opportunity to share their stories with each other. Ask your child about the story they created!

 

 

We talked about the letter Y this week and enjoyed exploring the color yellow. Children have the most beautiful understanding of the connection between colours and feelings. Here are a few of my favourite quotes from this week:

"Yellow makes me feel like theres sunshine in my heart...with glitter!"

"Yellow makes me feel like I'm in a field on a hot day with lots of sunlight!"

 

In addition to many math games and explorations, this week we began looking at how numbers can be broken down into smaller groups. For example, 5 can be broken down into 2 and 3, 1 and 4 or 2 and 2 and 1. Students were challenged to show the number 6 in as many ways as possible. Learning to break down numbers into their smaller parts is an important foundational skill in learning to add and subtract. 

 

Our popcorn word of the week is MY. Children are becoming experts at noticing these words everywhere. We get particularly excited when we find them on our clothes!! Words we have learned so far: I, a, the, my, you, to, he, she, me, be, we.

 

Classroom Reminders:

1. Monday, March 19th is classroom and family shopping day at our 23rd annual “Recycle a Friend” book sale. Each class will have a special time during the day to come in and shop. If you are interested in having your child purchase some books, they may bring money with them to school on Monday. Most books are $1. Families are invited to come in and shop from 3:30pm-6:00pm.

2. We are excited to invite you into our classroom to share in some of the work we have been doing! Please sign-up for a Student-Led Interview time. Students are an integral part of these interviews. Please bring your child with you. If you have any difficulties signing-up for a time, please contact the front office for assistance.

3. Just a reminder that there will be no school on Thursday OR Friday next week (March 22 & 23). In addition, Wednesday, March 21st is an early dismissal day for kindergarten only and afternoon students will attend on this day from 8:40-12:30. There will be no school for morning students on Wednesday. 

If you have any questions about this very confusing schedule change for next week, please do not hesitate to let me know.

Looking forward to seeing all of you next week!

Miss Roberts :)

We had another wonderful week filled with imagination and wonder. We had fun celebrating Love of Reading week and LOVED having our guest readers share some of their favourite stories with us. This was such a treat. Thank you SO much to those of you who were able to join us this week.

 

In honour of one of our very favourite authors and 2 of our VERY favourite story characters, children drew their own Elephant and Piggie pictures on Monday. They loved filling in the speech bubbles with silly dialogue between these 2 friends.

 

 

Having students understand themselves as learners is an important part of being in kindergarten. We often talk about and discuss questions such as:

What are my strengths? 

What might I need more practice with? 

What can I do to move my learning forward?

This week, students were introduced to a writing continuum to help them understand how they are progressing as writers. 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/level best matched what their writing looks like at this time in the year. Finally, students created goals to work towards to move their writing forward. 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. Ask your child what steps they are going to take to improve their writing skills!

 

Classroom Reminders:

1. As you look ahead into March, you may have noticed that Wednesday, March 21 is an Early Dismissal day. This is not an error. Afternoon students will attend on this day. Morning students do not have school.

2. We are collecting books for our annual school book sale from March 5-15th!  If you would like to donate any used books you have around the house, you are welcome to drop them off outside of the office. Thank you for your support!

Enjoy the sunshine this weekend. Spring is around the corner!

Miss Roberts :)

We had a wonderfully whimsical week in kindergarten! We exercised our imaginations this week by creating silly fictional stories. Each imaginary picture needed to show WHO was there, WHERE they were and WHAT they were doing. Children are perfect storytellers, full of wild and creative ideas. Ask your child about the imaginary story they created.

 

"One day I went to find my pet unicorn."

"When I woke up I turned into Spiderman and I went to find the real Spiderman and we fought bad guys." 

"My mom and me are in a castle and we are alicorns." 

"When Neel was at school, a cobra came into the class!"

To enhance our understanding of the letter D this week, students were introduced to an artist who is very good at using his imagination, Salvador Dali. We learned that he finds much of the inspiration for his paintings from his dreams. Children enjoyed reading stories about Dali, looking at his artwork and talking about the weird and wonderful things they could find in his paintings. We thought the melting clocks were particularly interesting and decided to create some of our own. Students learned how to use shading, highlights and blending to make their paintings look more realistic. 

 

 

 

We learned a very tricky new math game this week that made it very clear to see who has mastered the concept of more and less and is able to apply their understanding to simple problem solving. I would highly encourage you to give this a try at home to see how your child is progressing. 

You will need:

2 players and a set of number cards 0-10 

(have your child make them and practice their number printing skills!)

1. Organize the numbers into a line from 0-10

2. Partner #1 writes down a number between 0 and 10 and keeps it hidden from their partner

3. Partner #2 has to figure out the mystery number by asking questions. The only questions they are allowed to ask are:

 "Is your number more than ____" or "Is your number less than ____"

4. Partner #2 flips over numbers that are eliminated

5. When there is only 1 number left, Partner #2 says, "Is your number ___?" Check to see if your guess is correct!

Classroom Reminders:

1. If possible, please send your child to school with a water bottle each day. We often take "water breaks" throughout the day :)

2. Next week is Love of Reading Week! To celebrate our love of stories, I would like to invite some guest storytellers to come in and read to us next week. If you are interested in being one of our guest storytellers, I invite you to bring in one of your child's favourite storybooks from home to read to our class.  We would be so honoured to have you! Click HERE to sign-up for the day and time you would like to come in. We will have one morning and one afternoon guest reader each day.

Stay warm this weekend!

Miss Roberts :)