We had a spectacular week in kindergarten! Our letter focus was C and we came up with approximately 36289 things that begin with this letter...including the very city and country where we live!
Here's a quick snapshot at some of the different stages of exploratory writing your children are engaging in. All are developmentally appropriate at this time in the year. It is the goal to have every child independently sounding out words by the END of kindergarten.
Labelling pictures with beginning letter sounds:
Labelling pictures with beginning and ending letter sounds:
Labelling pictures with beginning, middle and ending letter sounds:
C is for Calgary! We talked about one of our iconic landmarks, the Calgary Tower, and created some pretty incredible sketches (the afternoon class will complete this activity on Friday). I am blown away by the drawing skills of our little ones. I simply put up some pictures of the Calgary Tower on the SMARTboard and they created these on their own! We ran out of time to colour these beauties but will definitely be coming back to them next week.
C is for community! We learned that a group of people who come together is called a community. We used Google Earth to explore our own community from a new perspective and talked about the many different kinds of communities we are a part of (school community, kindergarten community, sports communities, neighbourhood community, etc). We learned about the importance of signs (both street signs and labels on household items) to help keep us safe within our communities and searched for signs we could find in and around our school. Take a look for signs and symbols around your house and community! Feel free to snap a picture or two and send them our way :)
Early in the week, children shared about what they did over the long weekend. At this time in the year, our kindergarteners are using their oral language and drawing skills to tell personal stories and communicate ideas. As mentioned before, a child who can tell and draw a detailed story will later be able to write a detailed story. These are incredibly important early literacy skills! The kiddos enjoyed sharing about their family feasts and adventures over the Thanksgiving weekend.
"We had a photoshoot at Sandy Beach. There was green stuff on the trees. It was a foggy day. We had chicken and pie."
"We had 3 people over. We had turkey. We had brussel sprouts. We had cranberry sauce and gravy too."
"Me and my dad went on a bicycle. I watched television."
In math this week, we explored some open-ended number play. These activities are designed to build confidence with number recognition, accuracy when counting, subitizing (recognizing quantities without counting) and patterning. Be sure to point out and talk about numbers and patterns wherever you go!
I'll leave you with a few pictures from centre time this week 😃
Classroom Information and Reminders:
Here are a couple of OPTIONAL learning activities to try out at home if you're interested in reinforcing the work your child is doing at school:
- Go for a walk around your neighbourhood and search for signs and numbers
- Review the letters we've learned so far (P, H, F, C) and ask your child to tell you the rhyme and action we've learned for each one
- Have your child practice printing their name with a capital letter at the beginning, followed by lowercase letters (this is the fancy kindergarten way)
Please tell the kiddos that Mrs. Planden will be back on Monday! I'll see you all for another incredible week of learning on Tuesday!
Love,
Miss Roberts 💖
P.S. Have you heard about Crunchy the Caterpillar?! We meet a new puppet each week and Crunchy was our new friend for the letter C. They LOVED this guy!
