First fall blog!

Thank you to everyone for returning your trip forms so quickly! Please make sure the trip is paid for online and all trip forms are due by next Wednesday!!! Below are photos and short write ups about our week.

Firstly, we would like to let you know that we have some awesome Ninjas in our class. They know how to climb, jump, slide and kick. Below is a picture of the students being Ninjas and the writing they did to go along with all their Ninja powers!! We love to see the students get so excited about writing and in this case we had so much fun demonstrating their abilities! They even made Ninja outfits.

Some of you may have started your rock collecting and at school we have learned about all sorts of rocks. We read the story below to the class and learned about: wishing rocks, splashing rocks, resting rocks, worry rocks and many more. We than created our own prayer rocks which you will learn more about later! We have a wishing rock on our prayer table and we have seen students going up to it making wishes. It is so sweet to see their innocence and sweetness when they do little things like that.

We created a web full of questions the students asked about rocks.

To continue our shape exploring we played a fun game where we found shapes to match the ones we learned around the room. The next day we played a hide and seek sorting game with shapes and we had soooo much fun!

We encourage you to look for triangles, circles, rectangles and squares in nature and around the house to further extend this learning. We also learned about organic shapes. These are shapes that are all around us but don't have a specific name. We talked about our bodies and various art we make and how often we use organic shapes. We also used rectangular cards and numbers to try to work as a team and create our own calendar.

Students were also are very keen to find patterns throughout the room and to create patterns of their own. Below are examples of some patterning activities we did this week. 

Some of our friends love Beanie Boos and this allowed us to make a quick home check-in via Remind to see how many Beanie Boos one student had which motivated a great counting activity at school. We counted the total and tried to figure out how many colours of the cute little toys there were. If anyone has fun collections their child may want to share please print their photo and send it our way. We will gladly use it at a counting center and later for graphing.

We also learned that rocks are all different and everything in nature is created in many ways by God who helped create all that is around us. We followed this with a wonderful story. This story taught us about people's differences and how we should accept and love everyone as they are. Our differences make us unique and special! This prompted a writing activity. Some friends needed sentence starters, some needed help with letter knowledge and others wrote some letters and dictated their ideas. 

As you know we collected many sticks last week and looked at their sizes and shapes. This week we used those sticks to explore numbers further.

Overall, we had a fantastic week! We love learning and it shows!!! Have a fanatastic first weekend of fall.

A week full of fun and learning

We know we said we would update the blog bi-weekly BUT we felt like this week was so great that we just needed to share! So let us begin...

First of all of our new friends LOVE learning! Not only that but many of them enjoy creating new things from found items and we have encouraged the exploration of math and literacy through nature. At the start of the week we decided to begin creating our alphabet wall. We provided the students with various items and we began exploring new letters. Some chose their letter and others asked what letter they could do. The results were incredible. We realize some of you have not accessed our Twitter account yet (link went home in Mr. Zippy) so we are attaching more photos.

The making of our alphabet inspired students to want to explore letters more and we read the story Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. After reading the book students later played a letter recognition game based on the story. Others were later inspired to create letters from found materials in the classroom and a few really wanted to practice writing some letters.

We went on a walk to collect natural materials...this time around we focused on different size sticks.  Our walk was VERY interesting as students were pointing out colours and noticed that some trees and branches also look like letters and various shapes.  The next day we read a book "Short, Tall, Big, or Small?" and we discussed the differences these descriptive words demonstrate.  We than played a game together on the carpet with our sticks (WOW we made a mess!! BUT IT WAS GREAT!).  The game was to sort the sticks into categories that were mentioned in our story. 

The next day our students went outside and we gathered around all the sticks.  Since they were demonstrating an interest in shapes and letters we decided to challenge them and see if we could make various shapes and letters with our sticks.  We quickly learned that making shapes like squares, rectangles, and triangles was easy to do with the sticks but a circle was really hard! We came inside and learned that this is because the first three shapes mentioned have points and straight sides whereas a circle is one continuous curved line. We asked the class "What materials could we use later next week to make circles?" They gave us many great ideas all which you will see on the next blog.

Some boys and girls were drawn to the beads and the challenge was to try to create a pattern.  This was simply to see what student's already knew about patterns. One student created a three colour repeating pattern to create a beautiful necklace.  We will continue to learn more about patterns in the next few weeks using all kinds of fun materials. During the week other students also used materials to learn more about shapes, big/small shapes to fill in larger shapes, and to create patterns with shapes.

We have been learning about the word September, some of the days of the week, and slowly integrating more number knowledge into our days.  Below are pictures of our students creating the number cards which will later be used to create our very own handmade calendar.

We also opened a fun art project center today. This was to create a mural full of dots. This mural and a great story inspired students to begin to mix colours and they are starting to wonder what colours can be mixed to make new colours. This will be experimented with in the next few weeks.

Day 1 & 2 Update

We hope everyone is ready to start our first week of school with ALL our students present! We sure are and we are VERY VERY excited and hopeful that everything goes wonderfully.  The first two days with our SKs and our split up JK students were fun and full of energy.  Some of you already received pictures through Remind and now we will use some of those to explain activities we had going on for those two days.  

The plan this week is to get to know the alphabet some more through exploration of natural and human made materials in the classroom and we already put in a request for cardboard through Remind so we can create our alphabet.

All our students were able to meet Mrs. Koritko and received a tour of the school.  We already had some friends receive our school famous RADS and bring them to the office (Really Awesome Doings-yellow papers that go to our RAD assembly at the end of the month for a prize draw).  All of us were also able to get to know the gym and the library.  REMINDER: Library day as per the note in Mr. Zippy is Tuesday.

Below are some pictures and explanations from our first two days together.

Some students were drawn to the magnetic letters and board and actually used them to learn about words and letters/sounds.  We also had MANY students practice writing through picture drawing and learning about sentences (no picture for this yet sorry).

 In Kinderland we encourage everyone to make things on their own.  Here we see two students working on making name tags for their cubby area.  While doing this we assessed their knowledge of letters and sounds and wrote anecdotal notes on the back of each name tag. 

 Remember those calendars with pre-made numbers, months, and days.  We don't have that here.  Instead on both days we had our friends use delicious smelly markers to write the letters and sound out letters for the words in the day.  We also learned about shapes and counting by making shapes and writing the numbers that were for each day.  Our new students LOVED doing this and they were SOOOOOO excited to get a turn to try to write a letter or count and share with their classmates.

 Some students found the little bins and decided to play with the little bears we have.  Some made shapes, others counted the bears according to colour and some decided to make patterns. Sharing their ideas was so much fun and it encourages others in the class to try something like this next time they approach the bins.

 On day two our friends found a box full of instruments.  After allowing them to explore the various instruments and sounds we introduced rain sticks.  We learned to follow directions and the beat in a song while playing rain sticks as a group.

We hope this blog gives you some insight into what is happening in our classroom.  SEE YOU MONDAY!