We spent November learning all about our bodies. Students painted life-size self-portraits with their Buddies. They did a fantastic job!
November was a busy month with assessment and conferences. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me about your child's progress. I am so proud of all of my students. Let us take this opportunity to celebrate each child's effort, progress, and success. We spent November learning all about our bodies. Students painted life-size self-portraits with their Buddies. They did a fantastic job! We also introduced a new center at the discovery table. To complement our study of the 5 senses, I put out different sensory bins: musical instruments, feeling jars (for students to identify blindfolded), smelling jars (students guessed cinnamon and peppermint quickly, but others were trickier), and magnifying glasses and colour-mixing glasses. We also added a new listening game to circle time: students close their eyes and have to identify from where in the room someone is ringing a bell. How fitting with our study of taste that one of our new sounds this month was M for manger - the students all say mmm, mmm, mmm as they rub their tummies. Look at all the French words we were able to name with the sound m! We finished off our unit on healthy eating with a collaborative book on what we like to eat. Students each wrote and drew what they like to eat on their plate. We also had fun playing food Bingo.
1 Comment
Here are some of the books we read this week in Kindergarten. It's a great little series by Scholastic on character traits: I share, I'm nice, I'm a good friend. I love this series for community-building within the classroom. We accompany each book with a class discussion, and the students make an effort to focus on that character trait throughout the day. At the end of the day, we share success stories. It's always heartwarming to hear students talk about how someone helped them draw a butterfly or they cheered up a friend with a silly joke. There are other titles in the series that I will continue to share with the children throughout the year, or whenever we need a little reminder. In preparation for Remembrance Day, we spoke a lot about la paix and how peace begins with us. Madame Campbell's class sang a beautiful song at our Remembrance Day assembly. I read my class C'est quoi, la paix? by Todd Parr (amazing author/illustrator), and then we came up with our own interpreation of peace. Working with our Buddy class, we wrote and illustrated our own version of Todd Parr's book. Here are some of our ideas: Peace is being nice. Peace is saying please and thank you. Peace is sharing food. Peace is making friends. Peace is being a good friend. I would love to display these on our bulletin boards outside the classroom. Let me know if you are able to help out with that.
I hope you enjoyed the long weekend! What a fantastic week! A GROS merci to all the parents who made our field trip to the pumpkin patch and Halloween party possible. The children were all smiles. I hope you enjoy the photos. Feel free to send me any photos you want to share with the group. We began the week by getting excited for our field trip. We read all about les citrouilles, and learned our size words: petit, moyen, and grand. We also had a police officer come to talk to us about road safety and safety on Halloween night. Tuesday, we were excited to ride on our very first school bus. At the pumpkin patch, we rode on a hay wagon, chose our pumpkins (petite ou moyen), rolled around in hay, sang and danced. When we got back to school, we measured our pumpkins with cubes, and compared their sizes and colours. I hope you had a chance to carve or decorate them at home. Thursday was our Halloween party. Students rotated through 5 centers: Pin the Wart on The Witch; Mummy Wrap, where students wrapped each other with toilet paper to resemble mummies (at one point they even wrapped up the volunteer Maman!); Bricolage; a listening center with French Halloween music; and a craft centre where we made Jack O Lanterns. We also had healthy Halloween treats, like Frankenstein rice krispies, BOOnanas, and home-made fruit leathers shaped like bats. We reviewed our Halloween vocabulary with Halloween themed Bingo and we sang the new songs we learned for Halloween. Check them out under the 'les chansons' tab. We finished off the week with our swimming lessons, which are going just swimmingly. The swimming instructors are fantastic with the children. Thank you to the parent volunteers who keep things running smoothly in the change rooms. I hope you had a safe and happy Halloween! Our theme this week was shapes. To practice our vocabulary, we played a game at circle time where we sang the shape song and students would take turns blindly choosing a shape out of the bag and naming it. We also made an easy reader book on our theme, and practiced our emergent reading skills. When we read, we talk about how each sentence begins with a 'lettre majuscule' and ends with a 'point'. We read from left to right, and track each word with our finger as we go. We point out features of books, such as 'la page couverture' and 'le titre'. Students are always so proud that they can 'read' their books. To get into the Halloween spirit, we made a collaborative class book for our library on Halloween shapes. Students coloured different Halloween pictures, and we counted how many 'cercle' and 'rectangle' and so on we found in each picture. This book also uses the 'voici...' sentence structure - a very useful and Kindergarten-friendly sentence strucutre. Our classroom is beginning to look a lot like Halloween. During les maths, we made orange and black paper chains (patterning), and at les centres, students made 'les monstres' and 'les toiles d'araignée' at bricolage. We also added a dress-up center this week, and children entertained themselves (and me) dressing up as pirates, fairies, cats, and so on for Halloween. To finish off the week, we made Shape Monsters with our Big Buddies. I love how every monstre is different - it really showcases what a lovely, unique group we are in Division 15. Our Big Buddies helped us count how many of each shape we used in our pictures - this time using the "Il y a..." sentence structure. Our artwork is hanging on our bulletin board outside the class. Please come by and check it out. I'm very much looking forward to our field trip to the pumpkin patch on Tuesday and our Halloween party on Thursday. I'm still looking for more volunteers for our Halloween party from 1pm-3pm - let me know if you are able to volunteer.
In Kindergarten, we are learning about practices that contribute to our health, including healthy eating. This week, our vocabulary words were fruits. At snack time, I encouraged students to apply the vocabulary we are learning in simple sentences: "Je mange une pomme." Thank you to les mamans who volunteered during Apple Day. Students rotated through 4 learning centers: a tasting center where we graphed our favourite apples, a fine motor center where we beaded apple cinnamon cheerios on pipecleaners to make bracelets, a science center where we used our 5 senses to observe apples and compare their heights and weights, and an art center where we painted with apples like stamps. Later on, we also measured how many apples tall we are, made apple patterns, sang apple songs, and made apple puppets. Enjoy your weekend, and if you get a chance, maybe check out the apple festival at UBC.
We welcomed a new friend into the classroom this week: M. Épouvantail. We cut out and coloured our own scarecrows, and attached fasteners so that our scarecrows could dance. I love all the variety in the children's artwork - no two are alike! To help the children remember their autumn vocabulary (this is after all a 4 syllable word!) we stick out our arms like scarecrows and say in a deep bellow (because scarecrows are scary) - É POU VAN TAIL ! Ask your child to show you if they haven't yet. It's truly hilarious. I am trying to build up a selection of easy readers - books with a repetitive structure and simple vocabulary - so that children will be able to 'read' to self when we begin our literacy centres. We try to make 1 booklet a week related to our theme, and practice reading it every day. I encourage the children to follow along with their finger and repeat the sentences to me after I read them. This week we read "Je dis 'merci'" - a thanksgiving themed story. We went through and circled each time we saw the word "merci." Children coloured the booklets, and on the last page, each child drew a picture of something they are thankful for. I thought they did a fantastic job! To finish off the week, we made Thanksgiving cards with our Big Buddies. We practiced our cutting on some tricky shapes, and decorated with lots of feathers. Our Big Buddies helped us write something we are thankful for inside our cards. Thank you again to the fantastic Madame Angel and her class. Wishing you a restful long weekend and a Happy Thanksgiving! October is gratitude month at JQ, and to kick it off our PAC had the idea of making cards for Krystyna. Students drew something that made them happy to help cheer up our Principal. Get well soon Krystyna! We have been learning our autumn words this week, so we made a little booklet on autumn leaves. This also reinforced our colour vocabulary from last week. Madame modelled this activity on the board. Some of us found this a little tricky. We talked about how in Kindergarten, we try our best. We're all learning! We finished off our week with an autumn scavenger hunt around the school grounds. Together with our Big Buddies, we searched for leaves in the many colours of autumn. Our Buddies did a fantastic job helping, so a GROS MERCi to the fabulous Grade 4's in Madame Angel's class. I overheard many delighted students greeting squirrels: "Bonjour écureuil!" We made beautiful artwork out of our found treasures. Students explored texture by rubbing oil pastel over leaves. I encouraged the students to use all the many colours of autumn. We finished off the week by singing our new song, "C'est l'automne." Division 15 has been busy learning our French colours. The children looked adorable dressed in head to toe colours. I will get some photos uploaded soon. In the mean time, please continue to review the cahier de vocabulaire together. Your child is excited to show off his/her learning! We finished off this theme with our rainbow celebration. The children made beautiful hanging rainbow crafts to decorate our classroom. They also made their names into rainbow collages. They tore up coloured construction paper into tiny pieces - great for fine motor control. I'm very pleased with the results! We were very lucky to celebrate a couple birthdays this week. Bonne Fête Jason et Carson!!! The children were delighted to learn the words to Happy Birthday in French. Thank you to the parents who brought in delicious fruit skewers. The children loved their "rainbow" skewers - and we were able to call out the French colour words as we ate them. Language acquisition never tasted so good! Congratulations mes petits amis on finishing our first week of FULL DAY Kindergarten! We have a lovely group of little people in Division 15, and I am thouroughly enjoying getting to know you all. Please stop by our classroom after drop up or pick up, and admire our self-portraits on our bulletin board. Very soon, I will turn these into a book for les amis to read in our quiet reading corner. It is always a popular book! We continue to focus on learning important routines and classroom rules. After we read David Shannon's David va à l'école, we brainstormed how to make good choices at Kindergarten. We decided on the following rules: I use a soft voice. I listen. I walk. I share. I clean up. Every day I think with my head and my heart. Each student was given their own copy of the rules, and we discussed what it means to "think with our head and our heart." We will have many circle time conversations about this throughout the year. We finished off our "No David" theme by making David masks. The children happily roleplayed different rule-breaking scenarios with their Davids, shouting out: Non, David!!! Of course, we finished our role play with David making good choices. Oui, David!!!
Welcome to Division 15!
We are very fortunate to be in a large classroom with lots of natural light. There are many learning centers set up around the classroom: the kitchen, the puppet theatre, the listening center, the reading corner, the construction center, the discovery table, the sand and water table, the painting center... The children are so excited to begin their explorations! Please enjoy this tour of our classroom as it looks right now. I encourage you to look at these photographs together with your child, and ask them to point out their cubby in the cloakroom and their spot at the table. We sit at 3 long tables to encourage lots of collaboration and group work, and the children are further split into 6 colour groups. Once we begin full days, you might also ask your child what center they played at that day, and who they played with. I'm looking forward to building a relationship with the children (and you!) in the weeks to come. Happy browsing! |
AuthorMme Lauren Archives
January 2016
Categories
All
|