| Living, Loving, Learning in Kindergarten |
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We created framed family pictures this week. The children drew the people in their immediate family, they glued it to a 'house frame', and then coloured the frame. Each child presented their family picture to the class and introduced all of the people in their family. This is an important part of practicing their oral language. It can be very intimidating to present and speak in front of all of their peers. They all did an amazing job! 
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We've been doing lots of things with our names lately. This is helping us learn about the letters of the alphabet that are in our name. The focus has also been on uppercase compared to lowercase letters. How many letters are in your name?We cut our names apart and counted the number of letters that are in our names. Then we created a floor graph to compare them to our friends' names. 
Because we see the names of the children in our class every day that we are at school, they become some of the first words that we learn to read. We've been practicing reading each other's names in class big books, pocket chart songs, from the Special Friend list, and from many other places in our classroom. Name PuzzlesWe created 'name puzzles' by cutting each letter of our names in different shapes (practicing our cutting skills!) and then we had to put our puzzle back together. It became a bit trickier when we had to complete the puzzles of our classmates' names. Name CaterpillarsEveryone made Name Caterpillars. Each letter of their name had to go on one circle for the body of the caterpillar. They had to think about how many circles they would need to make their caterpillar and they also had to make sure that they made it go the right direction for reading purposes. It's harder than it sounds! We compared their lengths. Some of the caterpillars are very long and others are very short! We decided to have them crawl in and around our classroom tree.  Let's make our names!Using a variety of materials at our Discovery Centre, we had fun making our names!  We remember...We've been reading and learning about Remembrance Day and peace.   Our focus has been on how we can show kindness and how this relates to peace. The children all drew what act of kindness they can do to promote peace. During Activity Time the children have chosen to colour, make booklets, and do a variety of activities about Remembrance Day. A number of children have enjoyed the poppy creating at our Discovery Centre.  I provided them with the materials and the challenge...they had to come up with their own creations. The children are connecting with the Core Competency, Creative Thinking, and if they are working with a friend they are using the Communication Core Competency. They are practicing the skill of sharing their thoughts as well as listening to others' ideas. The children all made big poppies and we also created a class wreath. The children all traced and cut out their hands for the background. Tracing and cutting out our hands was tough but they did an amazing job! They made small poppies to decorate it. We used the wreath at our assembly on Friday. Our finished products:We also painted an Aboriginal poppy:   As part of our new re-designed curriculum, the children learned about our three Core Competencies - Communication, Thinking, and Personal & Social. The Core Competencies umbrella the literacy and numeracy foundations and essential academic content and concepts taught throughout the year. Core Competencies are sets of intellectual, personal, and social & emotional proficiencies that all students need to develop in order to engage in deep, life-long learning. We learned about the three Competencies this week and have begun to use the vocabulary in our daily learning. The children each chose a poster to colour. Throughout the year we will be making connections to the Core Competencies with our learning.  Halloween Day was such an exciting day. We loved wearing our costumes to school and doing the parade. Our party food was great and having Halloween stations was a fantastic way to spend our day together!  On Halloween, we enjoyed a variety of fun stations! Tic Tac ToeSpider Web - Catch the spiders!Spider RacesSkeleton GameGhost TossWe have been enjoying our weekly time with our Big Buddies! It's a great way for students to make connections with other children in the school. It's an excellent opportunity for the older students to take on a leadership role and it's nice for the younger buddy to develop relationships with older students in the school. Throughout the year we get together to read but we also do different activities and projects. We got together with our Big Buddies and made torn paper name posters.  The children enjoyed starting their mornings at our four Table Tub stations. The children were practicing a number of skills during this time of the day. They were especially developing their fine motor skills when working with a variety of materials, such as pencils, Q-tips, felt pens, and playdoh.
 I set up a challenge for the students to see if they could build a gate for our five little pumpkins. They had to use some good critical thinking strategies to find a way to balance the pumpkins. Many of the students came up with some good ideas. They planned them, tested their plan, and then often had to refine their thinking to make it work. These kinds of challenges are a part of the Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies component of our curriculum. We love our story "Five Little Pumpkins". We have re-told the story with our finger pumpkin mitt and with our flannel board. We've read it as a big book. But the best was when we dramatized it using our stick puppets. We've been talking a lot about 'being brave' - just like Kerry Koala from our Fun Friends program. The children got to practice this by standing up in front of their classmates and saying their lines. A fantastic job by everyone!! It's always a bucket filler to hear your friends clap for you when you finish!
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AuthorI'm Mrs. MacDonald. Welcome to a window into our kindergarten classroom. My goal of this blog is to give you an opportunity to see some of the things that we are doing at school. Enjoy! Archives
November 2019
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We read the children's book, The School Book by Todd Parr. We compared all the activities that he had included in his story book to what we do at school. There were many similarities.
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