Kinderland: Parent visits make Kinderland HAPPY!

What a great time we all had having all of you visiting us this week. The students LOVED interacting with the parents who were able to make it and we LOVED seeing them show you around and help you understand more of what we do in our classroom. The feedback has been so positive and we really appreciate it. We strive to have good home-school communication to keep you updated and to help our students/your children flourish and so far we couldn't have asked for a better few months. We know some sicknesses have arised and we will definitely accommodate those parents and children in the next few weeks as best we can.

We hope you don't mind but this weeks blog will mainly focus on showing our families with our students in the classroom.

We decided to show you our students love of learning by inviting you during their largest play/inquiry block. Many of you noticed that students are eager to participate in building, learning literacy skills and building on their math knowledge. We also had a sensory area set up to allow parents and students to bond while making their own Christmas salt dough ornaments. Below are some photos of the fun we had this week.

The parents and students also enjoyed working on learning more about what peace is and trying to recreate more of Todd Parrs beautiful reflections on what it is. It was also fun to work on marshmallow adding or number/quantity recognition with marshmallows (best part of course was that any left over were a special treat)!

Our students continue to be fascinated by building and we continue to encourage their creativity with taking things one step further and creating a tinkering area. The purpose of this area is to foster problem solving, social skills, fine motor skills, math skills and language skills by explaining what is being done. Screw drivers, nails and a hammer along side various pieces of wood were provided to allow our students to explore and later share some of their ideas. They loved working as teams! Some of our parents got involved too...take a look. If you have anything at home that can help further develop our tinkering area we are always open to fun new donations.

Our little builders continue to try to use various classroom materials to recreate famous buildings and work on new ways of making structures stand tall. We discovered that we can place pipes on an angle to make them rest on certain areas of the ceiling to allow new CN Towers to stand tall and proud.

Our students decided it would be great to try to use our puppet theatre and this developed into making our own puppets. They were provided with various materials and this built on their story telling skills/language and fostered their creative artist abilities.

And a few more from parent visits (we are so sorry we didn't get ALL your photos).

One of the most fun activities this week was being able to SKYPE another FDK class at St. Andrew's school in order to learn about trees from one another. We learned that in Oakville we had 25 000 ash trees cut down due to a bug that infested them and new trees were used to replace them. We taught our friends about trees in the forest we have since they don't have one and we also shared with them findings from Mountsberg. They told us they saw moss on trees and we couldn't wait to share real moss we found and explain to them what Native Americans used it for. Mrs. Koritko also came in to join in on the fun!

(Explaining what moss was used for a long time ago).

(Preparing our leaves to show St. Andrews what trees we have).

(Asking St. Andrew's FDKers some of our questions).

(St. Andrews students excited to learn).

Once our ornaments dried up a little some students began to ask if they could paint them and we began our decorating our ornaments. This is something that will continue into next week.