Happy Halloween! We had a spooky and fun-filled week together. It was so much fun seeing the kiddos in their costumes (I secretly wish everyday was dress-up day). Here's a glimpse into our world of wonder this week...

We also created some spectacular Halloween stories! We learned that every story needs CHARACTERS and a SETTING. The children used stickers for their characters and brought their story to life by drawing a setting to show us where their story is taking place. We watched a funny story called Alpert, which is all about how a magic line on your page can become almost anything. This gave us some great ideas around how to draw our story backgrounds. 

"First the ghost is scared because he thinks there’s a vampire but there’s no vampire. He goes to his mom and she said, “There’s no vampire.” Then he snuggled with her and he was happy."

"There was a ghost that was afraid of trick or treating so he ran up the stairs and he hugged his mommy. And then he ran back downstairs and turned on the light." 

"Once there was 2 little kids and one of them was a mummy and one was a vampire. And then there was a big underground snake coming up. One of them ran away into their house. The other one wasn’t scared. He kept going to get more candy."

This week's letter focus was A. As we become more confident with letter sounds, children are beginning to attempt middle or ending sounds in their journal work. This is not an expectation at this time of the year, but kiddos who are ready for this next step in their learning are always encouraged to do so. Some of us are still labelling with beginning letter sounds and that is absolutely perfect too! 

If you see your child beginning to experiment with writing at home, please encourage ALL attempts and do your best not to correct their spelling. This is a time of exploration and experimentation! When children ask me how to spell something, I say the word slowly, stretch out the sounds, and then ask, "What letters do you hear?" Then regardless of what letter they tell me, I say, "YES! Amazing! Write that down!" This builds their confidence and helps them begin to see themselves as writers. Take a look at the amazing writing that's developing in our classroom... 

A is for ANIMALS! The kiddos loved their new animal provocations this week and created some incredible artwork.

Wow! We accomplished a lot this week! Have a wonderful weekend! Please tell your kiddos I'll see them on Monday next week.

Love Miss Roberts 💖

Here's a note from Mrs. Planden...

We filled our days with PATTERNS in math this week! We began by reading Mr. Busy's Little Book of Patterns, a book that demonstrates how Mr. Busy's day is full of diverse patterns. The first pattern the students made was a simple AB pattern, as they were given two colours of dot stickers and were asked to create a pattern using the dot stickers and to then identify which colour was A and which colour was B. This is a step towards identifying the pattern core of a pattern.

In recognition of Halloween, we did a fun activity in which students made Halloween patterns with their bodies. This is a really fun activity that could be played as a family on Halloween! The students chose between the following four Halloween actions (of course you could always make up your own!) including:

Witches Hat (hands like a hat on top of their head)

Spooky Ghost (wiggling palms together back and forth)

Big Black Cat (hands out like claws)

Scary Bat (arms out like wings) 

Ask your child to make a Halloween pattern, and you can act it out with them. 

In addition, if your child is safely trick-or-treating this year or has access to a supply of candy, there are tons of opportunities to engage in patterning and sorting. I would love it if your family took some time out this Halloween to explore this. Learning to work successfully with patterns in kindergarten will help our students develop algebraic thinking in higher grades!

For the rest of the week, students continued to explore pattern making using a variety of natural materials, manipulatives, sounds and actions. We will continue to work on this skill in the coming weeks, as we build understanding of repeating patterns. Our learning target is to be able to create a two or three element pattern, and to be able to describe the core of the pattern (the chunk of the pattern that repeats).

Have a magical Halloween! I'll be in on Friday next week :)

Love, Mrs. Planden