Welcome to a New School Year!

Hello to Kindergarten friends, new and old!

I'm so excited to spend this upcoming school year with your children!

I have spent much of this summer preparing the room, redesigning, preparing curriculum, and preparing all of those other little things that will make for a smooth transition into JK and SK. Every step makes me more and more excited for the year to begin!

As I sit here in this new classroom thinking about what to say, I think I'd like to keep it simple and just let you know a few important things about our class:

1. You and I together will know so much joy seeing your child grow and learn this year

2. I believe with my whole heart that God has made every child competent, capable, curious, and wonderfully open-hearted to the love of Christ. I am so excited to disciple and guide and teach them as they learn about His love, His world, and living with His people in it!

3. I value you. You have decided as a parent to invest finances, time, and heart into providing your child with an education centred in the truth of Christ and God's love for His creation - thank you for trusting me to be a part of that. I promise to care for both their minds and their hearts, and I invite you to contact me at any time with questions, concerns, or comments. 

4. I am dedicated to providing your child with quality academic experiences, in literacy, in math, and all other curricular areas. I'm also dedicated to sharing my passion for learning, and showing your child not just what to learn, but how to learn. How to investigate, explore, and discover!

5. Your child is a leader. We will grow some habits this year that will help your child be effective in the gifts they have to offer their communities, at the age and stage they are now. They are not too young to be sharing their gifts of friendship and creativity (and so much more!) with the communities they are a part of!

6. I encourage you as parents to engage in this community! Talk to each other, comment on the blog, come to school events! We are so excited and pleased to have you join us!

Thanks for reading!

Sarah Kuipers

PS. Our class pet, Miss Carrots, is anxiously awaiting
everyone's arrival, too!

Our Last Few Weeks

Here is the last post of the year! And it will be a short one - I don't know how to sum up a year... It seems like this year has flown by and yet has been so full of special moments!

This week, we had many special things...

Making shape art

Games! We popped red balloons that had the name
of a game and confetti inside - then we enjoyed the game!

Teddy Bear Picnic

Making words in shaving cream! So much mess but so much fun!

We also ate yummy food (thank you!), learned about how volcanoes make rock, and cleaned up our classroom! It has been a fun filled year, full of learning, and I am so thankful to have been able to share my love of learning with your children. I have been blessed by their kind hearts and love for Jesus.

Thank you, parents, for your support and encouragement. Have a wonderful summer!

A Few Highlights

Thank you all for your kind words and emails as I was sick - I was so glad to be able to come back on Wednesday! Here are a few highlights...

Over the last two weeks we have done so much! We of course have also learned through our explore time. Here, LE (who we are very happy to have back!) and HA are playing with playdough, but also enhancing fine motor skills, and their counting as they practiced how many they made! Addition came in when they counted the total. 

Addition and subtraction has been a big focus of our math the last few weeks. We have started our math journal - every day we have a new question or prompt to get us thinking, and then we draw or write how we figured it out. Math journals emphasize the process as much as the product, which is especially important so that students can apply their skills to different situations.

We also got to explore a moth brought in by Mrs. B. from Grade 1/2. We loved seeing how it moved and hearing how it needed to dry its wings before it could fly!

We are getting good at knowing and using our decoding strategies - Stretchy Snake, Eagle Eye, Lips the Fish and all of their friends. We are expanding that now by adding comprehension critters, things to help them understand what they read. Questioning Owl (who is fortunate to live in a lovely garden now) tells us to ask questions about what we've read. We are practicing this and writing our own silly stories with characters, settings, and action to help with this and build our writing skills at the same time.

On Friday, we enjoyed the Grade 7/8 Hall of Faith, where students could throw stones (beanbags) at Goliath, knock over a heathen temple in Sampson's last act of strength, walk through the Red Sea, and more interactive activities. They also got to go up and talk to each character about God's work in their lives!

Next week we look forward to our class trip - these boys are all ready to go - and the Grade 8 graduation! We are getting lots of singing practice in for all of the events in the next few weeks!

A Peek into Our (hot) Classroom

Hello!

First Things First - I'm going to put some FYI's here for important dates coming up! All of a sudden there is just over four weeks of school left, and I'm not quite sure how that happened! They will be fun but busy weeks, so the following are some highlights to be aware of, specific to Kindergarten parent involvement (for a comprehensive list, check the front page of the Fridge Door!)

Friday, June 3 - Track & Field. You are welcome to come watch!

Saturday, June 4 - Spirit Run

Wednesday, June 15 - Field Trip

Friday, June 17 - Grade 8 Grad. Grade 8's will invite certain Kindergarteners to be their escorts up the aisle - if your child is one of those, invites will be coming soon, and all students prepare a special song together for the graduating class, so plan to be there if you can!

Wednesday, June 22 - Kindergarten Celebration of Learning. I'm so happy to be able to honour all the learning that happens in these foundational years. This Celebration of Learning will be for both JK's and SK's and we hope all parents can attend. Invites will come closer to the date with details, but it will be an afternoon event!

This week, we learned about Skippy the Frog, who tries reading the whole sentence to figure out the tricky word. We will work on applying these strategies for the rest of the school year. We read a book called The Letter Tree by Leo Lionni that showed us that it's not enough to write letters or even words - we need to use those words to say something important! With that as our writing prompt, it was so interesting to see what students wrote! Some wrote about people they love (mommy and daddy were very prevalent!), upcoming exciting events like sleepovers and our class trip, and things that are special in their lives, like playing with a sibling. Some decided the most important thing was to tell me about Jesus!

We also continued our pet project - how do people share knowledge with other people? How will we share our knowledge about picking a good pet?                                                                                                                                                                                 We finished our poster and newspaper article and just have some editing on the video... the students pick up on how to do this amazingly quickly!

We also did some fun exploring with art! I brought in some lilacs and we learned about mixing paint, mixing different shades of purple and green, and looked at how God made lilacs.

In math we worked on our teens, learning that teens were ten and some number. We also learned a song for it!

We made 30 trains (and found out that the bigger your item the longer your train), and also kept working on our estimating and showing our work skills!

One other thing we did was plan for a revamp of our house centre, something special for the last month of school. We took suggestions, discussed, voted, and a forest centre won! We made plans today and I will be collecting and buying a few things, but one request that students had was to bring in their costumes from home. So, we are wondering if you can help us out! Due to the heat, non-full body costumes would probably be best. 

Thanks!

If I have a candy, and you have two candies...

"If I have a candy, and you have two candies, and I give mine to you, how many do you have?"

I still remember being taught addition this way (always mildly disappointed that no candy ever actually appeared...)

Our math work this week has been a lot about these types of problems - how do we build numbers?We did a lot of math work this week, hands on, thinking hard, and talking with eachother to explain our thinking.

In Shake and Spill, students explored the idea that numbers can be made up of other numbers - the foundational concept of addition. They were given an assigned number, and two sided/coloured beans. From there, they could discover that 2 yellow and 3 red equaled five beans, but also that 4 yellow and 1 red equaled five, and five red and no yellow, and so on...

Students also explored this concept on a ten-frame (we used five and ten frames a lot to cement our memory of what these helpful numbers looked like). One partner would flip over some beans to the opposite colour and the other person had to figure out the math sentence (in this case, 6+4=10).

We also explored five and ten as we tried estimating! Students in partners were asked to scoop as close to five or ten as they could from either a bucket of little things or a bucket of bigger things. We discovered it is easier to estimate big things! Our partner would check our work by placing our scooped items onto a five or ten frame and saying if we had way less, way more, just a bit more or less, or just right! We are also building math description and vocabulary here.

And as a fun challenge, I put up the image in red marker and just asked students about it... "I Wonder what you see..." From there, we identified numbers, some that I hadn't seen initially, and realized that five was the only numeral we couldn't find unless we added two lines. The mathematical thinking coming from the students as they discussed which parts of numbers worked together and tried to think of other ways to see it (sideways? upsidedown?) was rich. We also looked at what other classes in Kindergartens in Ontario had discovered about this picture to see if that would add to our discussion!

In other non-math news, we really enjoyed learning about Elijah and Elisha this week - students were so engaged and asked for more and more, even at the expense of lunch! The picture on the right is of three leaders of their learning - Students asked if I had anything new for a Bible centre for those stories, but I didn't, so I asked if they could make one... they brainstormed, set out the playdough, and set to work making Bible story scenes!

We did big beautiful books outside to see what God has made, and once again enjoyed exploring outside in the sun! 

Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic (and Explorations,and Leadership, and Architecture, too!)

This was another busy week for us, but we did have a few days of routine, which was nice.

In math this week, we continued to work on number sense and application - you may notice games and activities based on counting and number combinations - we are building on the skills we have learned earlier and extending them to different problems and more mature concepts now.

We found different ways numbers are expressed in books.

We found different ways to make the number four or five with the Shake and Spill game, and students explored "number sentences!"

We also broadened our skills by practicing seeing sets of numbers, whether it was dots on a card or fingers - students would hold up a card or fingers for a count of one, and the other would try to guess how many it was. This teaches students brains to see groups of numbers and automatically know what it represents.

 For example     is five. We know that without pointing to each dot and counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Our class is beginning to recognize that as well.

We also loved our "10 on the Bed" song that helps us remember how to count down from 10!

There were 10 puppies on the bed, and the little one said 

Move over, Move over!" So they all moved over and 1 fell out. 

There were 9 on the bed... 

8 on the bed... 

7..., 6..., 5..., 4..., 3..., 2..., 

There was 1 on the bed and the little one said 

"I FOUND IT!" (the treat that was hiding)

In reading and writing we worked more on capitals - Miss K would make mistakes in the morning message and students would come and show me what to fix. They got quite good at proof reading by Friday! We used these skills to edit our books, and we practiced reading them so that on Friday, we could share with the Grade 3/4 class. We got to visit their classroom and spend time with our buddies showing our hard work on writing and reading!

 We also worked hard on remembering vowels, practicing long and short sounds, and learning how to use Flippy Dolphin (which is the difference between reading "Rory the T-Rex  was a /h/ /u/ /g/ dinosaur" and "Rory the T-Rex was a huge dinosaur." We practiced our vowels by finding them in words and books in our classroom!

Students also practiced their architecture skills during Explore Time. JA, LA, and GR build crocodiles at the art centre, and KI build me a house!

I read a quote once that I wish I could remember - something about how playing when they are little teaches skills for when they are big. This is so true - in this picture I see planning, spatial awareness, geometry, attention to detail, and the oral communication skills of being able to explain his work to me. The longer I spend with your kindies, the more I appreciate the connections I see happening in their brains as they play. Before teaching, I would have only seen a child and toys. Now I recognize a learner with tools that he is using to understand the world he lives in!

We were also great leaders with an impact this week. I hope you all enjoyed Parent Night as much as I did. 

In addition to Parent Night, we opened our class up for Get Ready, Get Set..., Read, and had some fun learning with Mrs. P. who shared with me after how wonderfully the students interacted and learned with her, even on a mixed-up day. 

We also worked more on our pet project, creating a poster to hang in a pet store encouraging people to choose their pet wisely so that they can have a happy and healthy home (just like Miss Carrots!)

MA also showed us a great example of Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind as she planned for a puppet show. She made a survey of who was coming, signs announcing it, set up her theatre, and gave a great performance!

I would like to leave you with this psalm our class wrote. In studying the life of David, we have seen his deep love for God and the way in which he worshiped, specifically in the Psalms. We wrote our own together (P.S. forgive the messy writing - sometimes my grown up hand can't keep up with their super-fast kindergarten brains!).

We use this as a group prayer now, and today one of our friends had the idea to write a good copy and share with some other classes, so we will see where this takes us!

Leadership Day and more!

What a week! One of the students today said that rest time was her favourite part of the week... that is not usually a listed highlight!

Despite the business of Leadership Day and Pedal for Hope and all of the "mixed-up day"-ness of our week, we still had time to discover and explore with eachother...

... and work on literacy and math, particularly real-life applications of both

We used one to one correspondence to count in number games, and begin simple addition skills as we added up numbers on dice. 

We practiced our shapes, number formation, and counting applications as well...

We also made number books which combined writing and helped us practice ordinal numbers (students were given instructions for first and second pages).

We prepared for Mother's Day - moms are so special and we loved reading stories and making our art!

 

We also had Pedal for Hope... for those of you who don't know, these police officers cycle for several weeks to different places raising money for cancer research. Part of the proceeds from our BCS Spirit Run will go to Pedal for Hope. They came in, did bicycle races with some students (and teachers) and a no-hands icecream eating contest! For more info on the cause: pedalforhope,ca

And I will finish with a few comments on the main event - Leadership Day! However, I won't go too detailed, since you will get a first-hand taste at Tuesday's Celebration of the Leader in Me.

Leadership Day is an interesting event for a teacher - we plan and prepare and encourage and assist, and then we step back and let them shine. Every one of the students had a role, either in the class or out. We had multiple songs to sing, as a class, with Grade 1/2, and with the entire school body. Two students shared our class mission and their own WIG. Kindergarten greeted, introduced themselves, explained the habits (especially Habit 3), defined "impact" and basically rocked it! We practiced and practiced and practiced and their hard work paid off. As we spent some time reflecting afterwards, it was wonderful hearing how their confidence had grown through the process, and their understanding of how they used the "tools" God gave them to be good leaders.

One of the biggest mindsets that I keep an eye out for in the primary grades - not only for the students themselves, but also for us adults - is the idea that these kids will have an impact "when they grow up," and that they "will be" leaders. Leadership Day for our class really enforced the message that we have been discussing all year - that they are leaders now, that they have impact now; God has given them tools and abilities that impact their families, their schools, their communities, right where God has put them. 

I don't think I could be more proud of the work they put in and the growth that I saw over this process. This is authentic learning for life. It was fun to celebrate their leadership together!

   

Have a great weekend!