Lately I've been saying to a few different people how much I love this time of year. Not the gray days or the dirty, dusty streets as the snow melts. It's witnessing the growth in the kindies' learning that I find exciting. They walk confidently through the halls, rush out eagerly to the playground and come into the classroom each day looking forward to seeing their favourite friends.
We know each other better now and it's time to express what we like about each other with our February friendship hearts.
We brainstorm what each child is good at or what we love about him or her. The big chart paper goes home and I print some of the ideas on a friendship heart.
The hearts will go in their scrapbooks. They have come up with so many amazing ideas about each other that my markers keep running out! It's so wonderful to see each special helper enjoy hearing about how much we care.
Our Valentine Boxes and Bee Mine Valentine Cards.
The other week we worked on Letter P. The kindies are learning about Penguins in the library. In the classroom, I read as many Tacky the Penguin stories as I could find. We then described Tacky and made a Tacky craft.
The kindies all loved Tacky, who is "an odd bird, but nice to have around". Currently we are working on Ww, we have a few crafts in progress that will likely be completed early next week.
I LOVE our multi-median snowmen. I found them on an art teacher's blog and knew that would be our next art project. It took time to complete all the steps, but it was definitely worth it! What do you think?
I love that each one is different.
The best part was how engaged the children were with the process. They loved the freedom of painting the background.
We read the book Snowmen at Night, to learn about shading the snowmen instead of leaving them completely white.
Then we read Lois Elhert's book Snowballs. After looking at all the creative ways she decorated her snow family, the kindies were ready to decorate their own.
Looking at these cheerful snowmen in our classroom almost makes me glad it's winter!
We've been working on the letters Mm and Nn, and made these...
We wrote a letter to Robert Munsch today, in honour of learning about the letter Mm.
The questions they asked are so cute. Do you have a kitten? Do you have a puppy? Do you think he'll write back? If you look at our letter you can see that I am now "sharing the pen".
We are working on "kid writing" where the children write the sounds they hear. This really helps them use their letter sound knowledge to make meaning and connections between reading and writing. Spelling is not the focus at this time. At this stage we want our kindies to be brave and engage in the writing process.
It is okay to get books and pencils into the hands of children even BEFORE they learn all their letters and sounds. So don't worry if your child is still putting it all together.
Here are a few samples of "kid writing" from our class. Some are only writing one letter and others are stringing quite a few letters together. We just celebrate the process!
Happy New Year! It's been a long time coming, but one of my goals for the new year was to get my blog up and running again! Many parents have enjoyed my blog posts in the past and I hope you will too!
Now that it is January we will be focusing more on writing and putting together sounds to make words. In kindergarten the focus is on recognizing and writing the sounds we know. Any attempts to put meaning onto paper is to be celebrated, whether it is through drawings, letters or words. Spelling words "the school way" may be talked about in class, but is not emphasized.
I love using our morning Chit Chat messages to work on recognizing letters, sounds and seeing patterns in words. The one below incorporates both science and math in our lesson.
The blue numbers represent the children's answers to the first question. As you can see many of our kindergarteners love eating snow. Then I sent our special helper outside with a friend and Mrs. Hall to collect some yummy clean snow that they would like to eat.
And we let it melt.
That afternoon we checked out our yummy clean snowthat was partially melted (and not quite so clean and yummy looking anymore) and gave the children the opportunity to change their answers. Well this group was so funny! As you can see by the pink numbers they don't mind the dirty snow a bit.
So we let it melt until the next day. Trust me, it wasn't pretty.
Success! (sort of) I sure hope those three little ladies were pulling my leg because that was some really disgusting water.
So we have a new behaviour chart in our classroom...
The kids love it and they are amazing! Every day they start on green. Then most of the kids work like crazy because they really want to be on blue (blue is really good). Yellow means you need to fix something to get back on green. And red...well...no one wants red.
So there you go. Ask your child about what colours they got each day.
Sometimes I let the "blues" wash their hands or line up first. Sometimes I give stickers. Sometimes I give everybody a sticker because I like spending my days with them.
We've been busy in kindergarten! Learning new letters, learning about Personal Safety and getting ready for the upcoming Christmas Concert on December 17th! Whew! My home life is busier than ever this year as well, and I'm still trying to find a way to fit my blog into my schedule. It's going to be my NEW YEAR's RESOLUTION! Except I thought I'd start my resolution early this year. I have so many photos... I'll start with the most recent and work my way backwards.
We wrote a class letter and mailed it off to Santa. The kindies loved telling Santa about our class!
All the kindies signed the letter. I wonder if Santa will write back?
Zero the Hero came on Thursday for our 60th day of school! He brought a Christmas tree craft. The children had to count out 60 ornaments onto their ten frames.
Then the kindies got to decorate their trees. I told them they didn't have to use all 60 ornaments. The trees turned out great, and the children were highly engaged and worked a long time on this activity.
Okay, the next photo doesn't look like much yet, but we are working on a BIG PROJECT. Anyone who was at our school last year might remember the ELVES we made to decorate the halls last December. Well we started them on Monday and still have a long way to go before finishing them...hopefully they'll be up by the end of next week! If you haven't seen the elves yet, you're in for a treat! It's one of my favourites!
Letter Dd work. In November I introduced our first Chit Chat messages. We've only been doing one a week so far. The children are so proud of their BIG WORK!
Sometimes we use a "feely bag" and guess what is inside to introduce a new letter. I'm pretty sure there's a duck in there!
This is what we do with the Chit Chat messages, you can see there is quite a bit of variation in fine motor abilities. In kindergarten, I always focus on progress, not product. I think they did great! Here's some letter Tt work.
That's it for today. Family calls! Wish me luck on my resolution to become a more regular blogger again!
I was away for most of last week, so I only have a few photos of what we've been up to.
Our completed pumpkins.
The 40th day of kindergarten already! Zero the Hero brought cheerios. The children used 10 frames to count out 40 and glue them on their page. A few got eaten along the way!
We learned about the letter Pp and about our Letterland character Peter Puppy. The kindies glued popcorn on the letter P. They are getting good at using drippy glue!
We read as many of Mo Willems Pigeon books that we could find and even watched the movie!
The kindies made poppies for our Remembrance Day wreath.
First we counted out 20 beads, then we made "bracelets" with pipe cleaners!
On day 30 Zero brought Halloween playdough. The children used their ten frames to make 30 playdough balls.
We had five Moms come in to help us make handprint Christmas trees for the school Christmas card fundraiser.
This is what they looked like before we sent them off to be made into Christmas cards. The children thought it was so funny to make Christmas trees in October!
Here is a Math game we played. The children roll a die (they thought it was so funny that it was called die and not dice when there is only one). Then they coloured the matching number. They really liked this game, and we'll play more variations of it in the future.
We drew and painted pumpkins. They are not done yet (yes I know Halloween is over!). The class loves painting, but the pumpkins are so big I can only take two at a time during centres.
The Halloween stations were a huge success, thanks to my many helpers! Here's one little kindie making "monster toast".
Yummy!
Spider hats! I don't think all the candy corn fangs made it home!
Glitter spider webs!
Candy apples! We also made bats, but for some reason I didn't get a photo of them. Just busy I guess!
The children were plenty excited for Halloween even without any sweet treats to eat. For the first time ever, I started to read a story and closed it after a few pages because the kindies could not focus on a story. This year's class just LOVES story time...so I knew they were excited.
Now that it's November, we will begin spending some time and energy planning our Christmas concert. Since the talented Mrs. Latta joined our school a few years ago, we have had wonderful concerts.
Next up is Remembrance Day. Our assembly is on November 8th. You are welcome to join the school for our assembly (it is usually very beautiful). I will know the time of the assembly by Tuesday.
We've been having a lot of fun learning about apples and the letter Aa in kindergarten. In Math we sorted our apples by colour.
A fun sink or float activity in science.
Getting ready for our apple taste test.
Yum! Which one will be your favourite?
There's Fred the Fish at the bottom of our graph. He always eats the biggest number! (His mouth is the < and > symbol!)
Drawing and painting our favourite apple.
Another way to show our favourite apple. There are a couple of extra red apples from kindies who missed the taste test, so the numbers don't quite match up.
A new challenge... showing our learning on paper
The easiest and yummiest applesauce ever!
Getting ready for our next taste test!
Success!
Apple Prints! The kindies loved putting apples on the tree branches they painted.
Learning about the apple life cycle.
Our favourite apple poem.
We've been having so much fun with apples. Thank you parents for all the donated apples.
Our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree, based on this story...
It's one of my favourites to use in September when we are focusing on names. Each kindie coloured the first letter in his/her name and then it was placed on our class tree. We're working on our own Chicka trees as well. This project is taking a while, as I can only work with a few kindies at a time, so they aren't all finished yet.
I love how all the trees are different. There is a lot of fine motor work involved in making each tree, which is good for developing hand coordination and strength.
The kindies have also been working on their rainbow names. Lots of scissor work here!
We made our birthday bears for our birthday train.
Our "sticker stars" hold all the stickers the kindies earn. They love them!
We met our first Letterland character last week, Clever Cat. We sang her song and even drew a picture of her!
Yes, I know it's backwards, but she did a great job on her drawing!
After I took a photo of this little guy's cat, he added a bunch of details and begged me to take another photo. How could I resist? He had created a very elaborate story to go with his picture. I love children's imaginations. Here it is...
We were all heroes and participated in the Terry Fox Run...
Welcome to KINDERGARTEN where it all begins! You are going to be amazed at how fast the year goes and how quickly your little sweetie grows up! I know I am! I just recently hired one of my former grade one students to dig up some plants in my yard for me - he's now in his fourth year of University! How did that happen?
For parents new to my blog, this is where I communicate some of what we're up to each week! I save a lot of the children's work for their scrapbooks, so you may not see a lot of paper come home from me! I learned over the years that it winds up crumpled in the bottom of backpacks so I do my best to prevent that. (Actually it's parent volunteers who put the scrapbooks together for me...so let me know if this is something you'd like to help with!) I also like to give parents something to talk about with their little ones after school. One of my last year's students told me how she spent one day during the summer sitting with her Mommy and looking at the pictures on my blog. I hope this blog gives your child as many happy memories as it did for her.
I haven't taken many photos yet! It's been all about teaching my 20 new kindies routines! It's been busy, noisy and fun! Thankfully I had a couple of helpful Moms in on Thursday and one reminded me to get my camera out and take some snaps of ZERO THEHERO's visit!
Who is Zero the Hero? Why he comes to leave something special every 10th day of kindergarten. It's usually something round like a zero...and this time Zero didn't disappoint! He brought delicious round blueberries! First the kindies guessed candy...but after a few clues they got it! I loved how they cheered and got excited to find out it was a sweet healthful treat! He also brought supplies to make Zero the Hero Puppets! So the Moms and kindies got to work and this is the result...
Colouring Zerothe Hero.
Glitter makes everything more fun!
And what happened to those delicious blueberries?
Mmmm! One batch of banana blueberry (milk free) and 2 batches of regular blueberry muffins!
Zero I can't wait to see what you bring on day twenty!