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!

Spirit Week!

What a crazy week!

I loved seeing the excited faces of our dressed-up students this week! Thank you for the hard work you did as parents - I was so impressed by the costumes!

This week, in addition to all the fun crazies, we also learned! This week was a good foundational week for us, focusing on math, literacy, and socio-emotional learning. We also learned about the why of Easter - bunnies and spring and pastel-coloured eggs are fun, but they are not what brings meaning to the holiday.

As we studied Easter, we continuously returned to the theme of God's never-ending, never-giving up, always and forever love. We learned that love, not nails, held Jesus there in His pain and sorrow. I saw the tender hearts of your children toward Christ as we walked through the stories of Passion Week. We also celebrated the risen King - the reason for our joy and hope today.

This co-created mural helped to cement many things. We synergized (Habit 6) to make it together, and we explored art techniques, using sponges, straws, and brushes for different effects. As students painted, I narrated the Easter story - the ultimate expression of Jesus' love for us - it was fascinating to see students emotions come out in their choices, and in some of the symbols. While difficult to find unless you know what you're looking for, students expressed their ideas of things like the tomb, a disciple, and a heart. 

We also had practice in our socio-emotional decisions. Weeks like Spirit Week are so fun, but lead to very tired students. This in turn (just as it does in adulthood), makes it harder to truly listen to eachother and work together. We turned this into a learning opportunity this week... taking time to explore our misunderstandings and "trying again" - using our habits to repeat the situation in a more helpful/kinder way. When this is done, it opens the door for Habit 6 Synergize - Together truly is better!

We could then have fun with things like eating at a restaurant (this was great for number skills and communication skills and etiquette). 

KI problem-solved to make a tall tower (he figured out that if he took off the chimney, made it bigger, and then added it back to the house, he could make it taller than if he tried to build up block by block!)

In math, we focused on measuring time. Students learned how to put things in order (first, next, last), and how to decide if something is short or long. Progressing there from student interest, we looked at how to tell time on a clock (by the hour). 

One of our favourite activities was to see how many times we could write our name - first during a short song, then a long song. We found out that we could write more with longer songs. In addition to practice writing their names, students practiced number formation and number sense, and oral communcation skills and they came up to explain their work.

This week, we worked hard on stretching out words (phoneme segmentation: cat becomes /c/-/a/-/t/). We used playdough to act out the way we use our mouth to hear the different sounds.

We used playdough for letter making too!

And one of the most fun things - Scrabble Day! First of all, we needed to have a lesson on vowels - we can't make words without them! ET provided the E, but we needed stand in paper for the other vowels. And then we created!

JAM

HOG

SOCK - we also learned that sometimes letters work together in pairs, like "CK" - we showed that by linking arms!

And to top it all off we enjoyed a wonderful fun afternoon! May you all enjoy your March Break and have the love of Easter shown to you in a new way.

Battleship Instructions

Teachable Moments

I'm going to break pattern a bit and tell you a story about my favourite moment this week! It was a teachable moment.. not a new term for parents or teachers or anyone else who works with children. These are the moments that pop up in a day when you didn't expect them and didn't plan them and that may actually interrupt your learning plans, but that provide fertile ground for seeds of learning.

On Friday, we had a great example of this. Two students came in from recess in a bit of an argument, and one came to ask me who was right. The question? Does Jesus love bad people or good people more? What a great opportunity, so we changed the plans for this section of the morning to talk this out with the class. I could not think of anything more important than exploring together the character and grace of Christ. 

The two students explained sincerely why they believed, respectively, good people and bad people were more loved by Jesus. Other members of the class all got to give opinions and then I asked where we could look to find out about Jesus. So we opened our Bible and read about God's plan of salvation - how everyone, even the ones that try very hard, sin. And how God, because of his Never-Ending, Never-Stopping, Never Giving Up, Always and Forever love, made a plan for us, through Jesus. And how John 3:16 says that He came to save the whole world - everyone. And as one of the original two said "So we were both right? Together?"

We prayed together in a circle and I wrote down some of the prayers after to share with you...

Dear Jesus, thank you for you.

Thank you for your never-giving up.

Help us make good choices.

Thank you for loving good and bad people and turning bad people good.

Thank you for our school to learn about Jesus.

Thank you for dying on the cross.

I'm so grateful to partner with you in nurturing their spirits to Christ. We started discussing Easter at the end of the week and will continue into next week. They have a wonderful, genuine faith in Christ and it's wonderful to see.

In other news, we now have a light centre table that students are using to explore light, shadow, colour, and design.

LA made the Montreal Canadians symbol and drew it as well, to record what he made!

 

A congratulations goes to JA and LA for their awesome job at Speechfest!

We also built literacy learning, reinforcing letter sounds and especially the correct formation of letters. It has been a goal in our Big Beautiful Books - to recognize our backwards letters and correct them.

Exploring with play doh has been a fun way to practice, letters, sounds, and word building while building fine motor skill and muscle development!

We also used it to create some of the animals we have learned about, and practiced stretching out the names "like bubblegum" to find the letters. 

We practiced more measuring as well!

As a table centre, students revisited the topic of length, with the added challenge of recording the lengths they found!

Our new topic was weight and mass. Both as a whole group and as an ongoing centre, we examined topics like heavier and lighter, and that bigger does not mean heavier! We brought down the scale to see if Miss Carrots has grown, and she has apparently outgrown our scale. The hunt is on for another! So instead, we measured our plastic rhinoceri, and again had the challenge of recording it!

On Thursday, we had Get Ready, Get Set, Read, and the SK's baked muffins during that time! To celebrate both the JK's and SK's leadership during those non-routine days, we had a class picnic with those muffins and some goldfish. So much fun!

We also used them to practice our estimation skills - we could fit 7 muffins on a plate (we also had a teachable moment about how to remember the direction of the number seven.)

Finally, the students who baked were asked what they would like to do with the extras! They put their heads together, decided to give them to the teacher's (what a good lead-in to Random Acts of Kindness Week!), made signs, and then distributed the very-much appreciated muffins!