We’ve had a really busy few weeks so it’s wonderful to get back to our regular timetable and everyday routines.  We appreciate structure, knowing what’s going to happen next and a certain amount of predictability.  It helps us personally with our own self-regulation and we know our students thrive on it.  Although there is excitement in the unknown, being flexible (one’s ability to self-regulate, cope and manage changes in a day) is a skill that is learned over a lifetime and one that we most certainly teach in the Kindergarten.  But we need to teach those concepts within the context of what familiar days and patterns look like so when our schedule is stable, we can accomplish a great deal.

What have we been up to?

Well, we officially finished our Alphabet Books last week with the “Z” page and painting zebra stripes for our “Z” craft.  But many children had missed out on some alphabet pages due to travel, sickness or a late start at Ridgeview.  So we had three days of finish-up for all the pages missed.  You can see from the photo that we had our alphabet charts displayed on the wall (and on the floor) for children to fill in their pictures, labels and printing.  The children were meticulous in diligently going through their books to figure out what pages were incomplete.  

This massive undertaking was taking place alongside preparations for Welcome to Kindergarten (Parent Information Evening on April 25; new Kindergarten student participation on April 27 and 28), our fabulous Student Led Conferences (May 4), Mother’s Day paintings (May 5) and classroom preparation (May 6) for our school’s Mayfair (May 7).  Our classrooms usually looks like this:

But for the Silent Auction (my classroom) and Book Sale (Christy’s classroom), our classrooms looked like this:

We want to thank the Kindergarten children and Grade 7 students for helping us to not only take down the classroom on Friday for Mayfair, but also for restoring the classroom again on Monday morning.

This Week in Our Room:  May 9-13, 2016

Our big excitement this week was taking our class photos and our school panorama photo!  It’s a special moment for us and our students to gather together for a photo the children will always remember as “my first school picture.”

We’ve been working hard on our Inquiry study on local plants.  We learned about how plants grow (germination, roots, stems, leaves, pollination) and we crafted our beautiful Plant folders.  We also had a Mystery Box Inquiry where we placed a selection of seeds in the Mystery Box and asked ten questions before guessing.  Then, we sorted and classified the seeds and matched the seeds to the plant envelopes.   We finished our last lesson today with “How Seeds Travel” and planted our bean seeds.

We started our next Math unit in Geometry.  We brainstormed all the geometric shapes we know and read Brown Rabbit’s Shape Book by Alan Baker.  We’re now starting to learn about the individual two and three dimensional shapes and their properties, beginning with circles and spheres.

We also launched our Fairy Tale literature study with Once Upon a Golden Apple by Jean Little, Maggie De Vries and Phoebe Gilman.  This delightful story makes plenty of references to nursery rhymes and fairy tales and we had lots of fun reciting the nursery rhymes we recognized and identifying the fairy tale titles from the hints in the story.  

Upcoming Events and Reminders

Friday, May 20, is a Professional Day for teachers.  Students are not in session.

Monday, May 23, is Victoria Day and school is closed for everyone.

Friday, June 3, is our Ridgeview Sports Day.  Please note that Kindergarten students will be dismissed at 12 pm that day.  If your child attends Camp Ridgeview, please be sure to let them know we will be dismissing early.  We will send out more information about our student expectations for Sports Day in the next two weeks.