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 :)