Practice, Practice

We started preparing this week for Leadership Day! Leadership Day is a wonderful opportunity to showcase students' strengths, to make an impact on guests coming through our doors. 

Every member of our class has a role, from greeters, to Habit - explainers, to students explaining some of the work we've done. 

Students will be practicing throughout the next two weeks to interact with our guests confidently!

We have also practiced our numbers, specifically our teens, and counting higher than twenty. As we practice, I am amazed how quickly the students, both JK's and SK's, grow in their skills.

One of our favourite ways to do this is a game called Race to Finish - students roll and count dice (includes addition skills) and fill up their page - then they count again to see which colour won!

We also created our own number line, showing representations of numbers in various ways - numerals, words, tallies, pictures, ect.

We practiced cutting by making snip soup!

And as always, we learned through exploring. In this learning stories, some friends set up a house, which then "got on fire" and they made ambulances, fire trucks, and hospitals to work together and save everyone! Their creativity and ability to synergize and explore real world concepts is always a joy to experience!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Sunny Days and Smiles

Spring has (finally) sprung! And oh, were we excited!

The last two weeks in pictures...

1. Teeth and smiles!

We learned about dental health this week - brushing our teeth, going to the dentist, and keeping healthy.

2. As you may have seen at the Spring Fling, Kindergarten was in charge of making 100 placemats! The students went for this goal, this end in mind, in full force, asking to work on it multiple times throughout the day. We tied in data management - how will we keep track of how many we have?, groups of ten to 100, number value and how numbers are sequential, and lots of learning about things we see in spring and ways to illustrate them!

3. A new art provocation - students came in on Thursday to see flowers in a vase. After a modeled lesson, they were invited to illustrate what they saw. They did a beautiful job!

4. A new centre was created, the habitat centre! Students are exploring why God made different things to live in different places, and how we made them exactly right to live where they are. We discussed animals that need a wild habitat and those who can be pets and then what pets need in a habitat.

5. This led to a discussion on if there are good pets and bad pets, and if some people don't give their pets good habitats. Our class is now an expert on guinea pig habitats, and are quickly learning to apply what they've learned to different and different animals. 

6. We also explored Venn diagrams, as an extension of sorting - we then sorted food into yes, no, and maybe/sometimes; we also worked on a Venn diagram for good pets/bad pets, and maybe/for some people pets (ie. horses would be a good pet for people who have space and money).

7, WIGS!

We have been working since March Break on choosing Wildly Important Goals - now that we understand WIGS and have learned how to work in groups, we have started a new system where small groups work on their WIGS every morning - this gives consistent practice and the chance to own their learning and work with each other and myself more closely.

Back again!

Hello! I hope you all enjoyed the March Break. We enjoyed opportunities to talk about our adventures and family times over the break.

In talking with the students on Friday, several moments stood out as highlights...

1. Learning about money is fun! In Kindergarten, the learning goals are: understands that money has value, money can be used to buy things, and what a nickel and dime are. We also introduced the penny as some have seen it before.

Students sorted paper coins and counted...

Looked at real coins to see what they could discover...

And our favourite - practiced our money sense buy using money to buy our afternoon snacks and drinks from Miss Smith's Snack Store!

 

2. There is no better story than Easter. Our God talks this week focused on the resurrection and ascension of Christ, and the giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We enjoyed a new centre for explore time - the Bible centre changed to a "tomb" for the ressurection - as so often happens, the students exceeded my expectations in their expectations, and groups acted out the entire Passion Week, from the triumphant entry, to the arrest in the garden, to the trials, crucifixion, burial, and then finally... after exclamations of "One Day... Two Day... Three Day!!!" Jesus bursts forth from the tomb!

3. Our Alphabet Walk. We also went looking for letters in the objects around the school! For example, an O in the doorknob!

4. Books, Books, Books!

Now that we have created several class books together, it's time for students to make their own (JKs with 2+ pages, and SKs with 4+ pages). 

We planned what we would write about, growing knowledge through lessons and one-on-one time on letter formation, choosing what information to write, word spacing, and pencil grip!

We then got to see one of our friend's share his finished product!