A Busy Monday!

We could tell that everyone rested over the weekend because the students all came in this morning eager and ready to learn! We started language jobs this morning. This is an opportunity for students to work in small group on language based activities. We are focusing on the letters and sounds if the alphabet during this language job rotation. After the students completed their jobs they had free choice activity time. This is a wonderful time for students to begin to develop new friendships.
We introduced the idea of Bucket Filling to the students (there is a link to the Bucket Filling website under links for parents). We talked about ways we can fill someone’s bucket (help, share, be kind) rather then dip someone’s bucket (be mean, take something, unkind works).
We finished our day with math jobs. Students had the opportunity to work and explore different math manipulatives.

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Back to routine!

We trust that everyone had a wonderful March Break! It was so much fun to hear of all the exciting adventures. We started Monday morning by writing about these adventures. Everyone had such great stories to share.

We have started to talk about situations in our lives that make us feel and unsafe. Yesterday with our buddies we drew pictures and wrote about times we felt safe and unsafe. We will continue to focus over the next few weeks ways we can be safe (at home, at the park, swimming, etc).

We have started a new unit in math on 3D shapes. We are using lots of great math words – sphere, cylinder, cone, cube, pyramid, prism, face, edge and vertices. The students are spending times during their math jobs exploring, building and examining these shapes that are ‘fat not flat’.

If you have any ‘recycled’ 3D shapes that you would like to donate to the class (paper towel cylinders, empty boxes, cans,etc) we would love to have have them to create using 3D shapes at our science table.

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Another Busy Monday

Yesterday was another busy Monday and we can’t believe that we had to turn our calendar to March. March Break is just around the corner, Easter will be here before we know it and soon enough we hope to start seeing the signs of spring. As we start moving towards the end of the year our Senior Kindergartens will be preparing for their transition to grade one and our Junior Kindergartens will be preparing to become Seniors. Please remember to continue to help your child develop their independence my making sure that their communication bags are sent daily and all forms of communication are sent in the bag (notes, money, forms, home reading folders, etc). This allows your child to be independent in making sure items are seen. We do not have time to check 26 backpacks every morning.

We have started ‘mystery star’ of the days. Each morning we pick a mystery star. The students share great things about that person and we work on making sure the go home with a ‘full bucket’. Are star yesterday was Simon.

Our new language jobs focus on ‘All About Me’. Math jobs are focused on patterning. Science we have been mixing primary colours and finally we continue to write in our journals.

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Our Day!

Today was a busy day! We started the day learning about mixing colours and put our colour mixing skills to use by finger painting. During gym we put our dancing skills to test by doing Zumba to some great songs. Once our finger paintings were dry after snack, we turned our creations into monsters. We added ears, nose, ears and hair.
Finally during Dinosaur school we met Tiny Turtle. We taught us his secret about how to calm down when he is upset. We need to stop, go into our shell, and take deep breaths. When we are back in the green zone, we are better able to solve our problems.

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Reading Strategies

We have been learning many different strategies to support our reading. We have learned about “Eagle Eyes”, “Fish Lips” and “Stretchy Snake”. “Eagle Eyes” teaches us to use your eyes to look at pictures to give us clues about what we are reading. “Fish Lips” tells us to get our lips ready to say the first letter/sound in the word. Finally “Stretchy Snake” tells us to stretch out the sounds we hear in a word and then work on putting them together.

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Blends

We have been busy learning about the blends ‘sh’, ‘th’ and ‘ch’. We read a book focusing on each of these blends and learned that the blend can be at the beginning of a word, the end of a word or sometimes even in the middle of a word. We went on a blend hunt around the school. The students did a great job finding the blends. We did find that sometimes blends can be tricky and don’t make the sound we think they should. We are challenging the students to look for blends around their house.

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