This week was very significant as we finished our Alphabet Book with the letter Z.  Imagine that our children have been working diligently on a page a week – they are real experts in where to print their name for written work, printing uppercase and lowercase letters on a line, finger spacing, following directed line drawings and labelling their pictures so the reader understands their meaning.  We’ll need a couple of weeks to complete pages that were missed due to absence; we will certainly try our best to finish everything but that may not be possible.  In this event, your child knows exactly the routine we use at school and can finish up at home.

We’re starting Fairy Tales during Literacy Time.  It’s one of our absolutely favourite integrated learning experiences for the children.  Under our watchful eye, our UBC Teacher Candidates will be teaching many different Fairy Tales, the structure of stories (beginning, middle, end) and the elements of a story (plot, character, setting, theme) with the Kindergarten.  The children will hear different versions of the same story to compare and contrast, complete a variety of written response activities, experience lots of oral storytelling and make some fun crafts so they can retell the stories themselves at school, and then at home.  The first story this week was “The Three Little Pigs.”  The literary focus was on beginning, middle and end; the children made Wolf puppets during Art and Piggie stick puppets with our Big Buddies.  

Our UBC Teacher Candidates (TCs) finished up their teaching of Geometry in Math.  The children learned about the basic two dimensional shapes (circle, square, rectangle and triangle) and their corresponding three dimensional figures.  The unit culminated this week with some fun shape pizzas!

We made our beautiful May self-portraits this week with a cute and colourful ruffle.  We’re so pleased to see how the children have improved in using line, shape and colour in their artwork.

Could Friday have been any busier?  It certainly stretched mine and Christy’s self-regulation but as always, the children go with the flow and were very flexible throughout the day as we needed to be.  

The day had no sooner begun with Centres then we were called outside for our class photos, and very cute and charming we were.

After recess on Friday is always busy with our Big Buddies, but the Grade Sevens got called to their classes photos in the middle of our Buddy Time!

Just when we thought we would settle in for a relaxing Friday afternoon, we were called to the playground one more time for the Ridgeview panorama photo.  We won’t try to explain what it’s like to organise approximately 390 students for a photo (with the Grade 7s at the top of the climbing net) but let’s just say…we can do it once a year.

The second part of the afternoon was great fun with a Forest Friday lesson.  Our TCs are observed weekly by their UBC Faculty Advisor (FA) and they proposed to show her a team teaching lesson where all the Kindergarten children were divided into three groups.  Each group completed a trio of forest activities – bark rubbings, nature colour matching and a drawing of a natural object.  The lesson was a huge success, the children were so happy to be moving and learning outdoors and it was all capped off with a Freezie (we took the gigantic Freezies from the Freezie sale and cut them in half and we will eat the other half this coming Friday–if nothing else, Christy and I are very thrifty).

The staging for the The Lion King” and “Simba’s Story” comes to the gym this week so PE classes will be moved outside for the time being.  We will be rehearsing in the gym during our Music classes, and for any additional rehearsals where are presence is requested.

We’ve had a re-think about our costumes for “Simba’s Story” and rather than our “best,” we’re thinking about dark bottoms and coloured t-shirts.  We’re going to leave it to you to locate the dark bottoms (no jeans, but navy or black) and girls may wear leggings instead of pants.

We are considering a lion cub headdress but we will get back to you on this later in the week.   Please check your Remind texts.  For the moment, you do not have to purchase anything.

Upcoming Events and Reminders

You have another week or so to get your Grade One School Supply order completed.

We’re still accepting April Homework Calendars for a sticker!

May Scholastic Orders are due this week on Friday, May 10.

Library Books should be returned tomorrow for our weekly Library Book Exchange.