There was a lot of talk about kisses and hugs this week…we’re working on the letter X in the alphabet! We read one of our favourite books, Alphabet Mystery by Audrey and Bruce Wood, as our literacy connection (and indulged my fondness for mystery books of all kinds). Only two more letters to go and we will have finished teaching all of the letter names, sounds and formation for upper and lower case letters. Our children will show you their Alphabet Books on Thursday, at their Student Led Conferences. You will be amazed at their progress this school year.

The Earth Rangers came by with a special presentation on the protection of animals and their habitat. Special visitors included Quillo the porcupine; Crimson the Tegu lizard; Katira the falcon; and Sonic the barn owl.

The Easter Bunny came early to the Kindergarten in the way of some very fun crafts and activities. First up — wax crayon resist patterned eggs. We had quite a bit of fun dreaming up patterning ideas using lines, dots, letters and symbols with our crayons. Then, we applied a paint wash using tempera paint pucks. Our efforts created a beautiful Easter basket full of eggs.

Next — Easter egg decorating! Thanks so very much to our parent volunteers who rolled up their sleeves to help our children make two kinds of decorated eggs: a simple wax crayon resist egg, and a batiked egg. We used crepe paper to make our dye (pour boiling water over the cut up crepe paper to drain the colour; let it sit overnight and remove the paper in the morning). The children already knew what to expect from the wax crayon resist technique, but using pipettes to dribble colour on their fabric wrapped egg was a new method.

For a little more Easter fun, we gave each of our children an Easter egg which contained some alphabet letters, Easter grass, jelly beans and mini chocolate eggs. With a bit of colouring, letter matching, gluing and snacking on sweet things, we’ve created a special message for you:

Upcoming Events and Reminders
Library Book Exchange on Tuesday. Please bring your library book into the classroom for the library book bag.

Thursday, April 20: Early Dismissal at 1:50 pm for Kindergarten students only. Please be on time. If you child attends Camp Ridgeview, we would appreciate it if you could inform them of this change in schedule.

Student Led Conferences: We’ve got just about every family signed up for Student Led Conferences on Thursday. Please remember to bring your Kindergarten child to the conference. We would prefer that arrangements be made for siblings so that you can focus on your child’s conference.

Well, the weather outside this Spring is frightful, but here in the Kindergarten, we’ve moved on to summer (at least in our thoughts) with our delicious “w is a watermelon” craft this week. We’ve been updating all of our Alphabet crafts this year so the children can create them with more independence. This might have been a bit of a stretch with all of the gluing, measuring and trimming but we think our classes did an admirable job.

Speaking of Spring, we are having a ton of fun with our Sharing Theme, “Signs of Spring.” Thank you to everyone who has had a turn so far, for bringing in photos and cuttings from your gardens, hand-drawn pictures, Easter baskets, bunny ears, stuffed animals and storybooks. We are learning so much about seasonal changes from Winter to Spring (technically, that is, as the warmer temperatures are nowhere to be seen). We’ve been trying to get outside as much as possible. For sure we can say that our rainboots are getting a lot of use this year.

We saw our Big Buddies on Wednesday to make the Bunny Baskets for Easter egg decorating this week.

On Tuesday we held a very special Nowruz celebration that was organised by our Farsi-speaking parents in the two Kindergarten classes. The children participated in five different centres in their own classrooms, including several crafts, and learning about the haft seen table. This was a cross-generational occasion with classroom parents, grandmothers and a parent from last year’s Kindergarten to help and join in the fun. Then, all 40 students gathered in my room to enjoy a food tasting, banquet style, of savoury and sweet delights. Truly, all of the great cultural celebrations are centred around the sharing of food, conversation and enjoyment of others’ company. We feel very privileged to have had such a the high level of parent involvement in our classrooms.

Let’s Dance! You’re looking at the next generation of hip hop dancers! We’re so proud of our Kindergarten — what an accomplishment in learning such a complex dance routine, following our dance teacher’s instructions and working together as a group. Thank you for helping your child with their dance “costume” – we looked really awesome!  (Photo from Twitter)

Upcoming Events and Reminders
Tuesday is Library Book Exchange. Please have your children bring their library book into the classroom to place in the library book bin.

We’ll be colouring Easter eggs next week. Thanks to the parents volunteers for coming in to help.

Save the Date: Student Led Conferences take place on Thursday, April 20. We will let you know through a Remind text when the sign-up sheet is posted. We plan to accommodate only 5 families at a time, for a 25 minute conference for student and parents. This conference is for your Kindergarten child so siblings should wait on the playground. Kindergarten students only will be dismissed at 1:50 pm. Our conferences start at 2:00 pm promptly so please be on time to pick up your child. For parents new to Student Led Conferences, you need to bring your child to the conference. The children will be in charge and leading the conference.

Welcome back, everyone! We certainly have finished this week on a high note with the return of the sunshine. Hopefully we have left the winter behind and focus on enjoying ourselves outside.

This is a very unique time in the life of Kindergarten, for the children and ourselves. Suddenly, the children are very mature. They’ve returned to school quite serious, with keen listening skills, a sharp interest and more awareness in what they are doing. The children understand the importance of the school day routines, their self-regulation and how that affects their learning. We love how the children have internalised the expectations of the classroom, and their behaviour reflects that knowledge in how they clean up the classroom, set-up their printing page or line-up to leave the classroom, just to name a few. They are making connections between our daily activities and literature, to nature, and the broader scope of their environment and the world and verbalizing it. We’ve had a few “A HA!” moments already this week. It’s really quite amazing, and we are so privileged to be a part of your children’s learning.

Without missing a beat, we’re right back at it with the letter “V is a vine” for our alphabet work.

We’re continuing to work through our numeracy unit as we explore the number 8. We can see many children are used to playing games with dice as they recognise that 2 4s are 8 in a dice throw. They also showed 8 using different kinds of materials such as blocks and bingo markers. Sometimes, children got carried away and discovered they had bingo marked 9 or 10 dots for their picture; that led us to a good discussion about the importance of counting, keeping track of where we are and being mindful of the task.

This week we started two weeks of Dance instruction during PE. We’re fortunate to have Mr. Aerhyn Lau here to teach us a great little hip hop dance to “Enjoy Yourself” by Michael Jackson. We’re pleased to see so many children trying to focus on the steps and sequences with energy and a positive attitude. Our sessions are long, and the children are on their feet the whole time; there’s lots of listening and repetition so they are to be congratulated for their perseverance in learning their dance. Please note that our students need to wear black pants and a yellow top for their dance performance on Friday, April 7. They will also need their running shoes.

Upcoming Events and Reminders
We’re still collecting the report card envelopes for our classes. The insert is yours to keep and we will recycle the envelopes for our third term report cards.

We sent home a number of letters from Vancouver Coastal Health regarding Kindergarten student immunization. If you have already had your child immunized but forgot to notify the school, please make a copy of the immunization record and return it to your teacher so we can pass the information on to our school public health nurse. If you are not intending to immunize your child, please note that on your letter and return it to school. For everyone’s personal safety, Vancouver Coastal Health must be aware of who has not received immunizations so that in case of an outbreak, families can be notified.

We will be celebrating the Persian New Year, Nowruz, on Tuesday, April 4. Thanks so much to our parent group for organising this special occasion for our Kindergarten children.

We’re starting a new round of Sharing and Special Helper on Monday. Our theme will be “Signs of Spring.” We’ve read a few books and had several discussions on what would be appropriate to bring for sharing. We’ve talking about flowers from our gardens, pictures of our home garden, books about spring, things we might use in the spring (garden tools, baseball season begins, hockey playoffs) and a return of animals we see in the spring. So we have a few ideas and we ask parents to please support their child in finding something together to share at school. It’s fun for your child if you help them to write a little descriptive explanation for him or read to read (or for us to read) and explain.

Wednesday, April 5th at 9 a.m. there will be an ELL Parent Cafe in the Ridgeview Library. Parents/guardians of Ridgeview second language students are invited to attend an informational workshop about Spring Assessments for ELL Learners. Please join Ridgeview ELL teachers to learn about the assessment process in West Vancouver. Ridgeview ELL teachers Mrs. Yioldassis, Ms. Wong, and Ms. Price will be available to answer your questions following this workshop.

Okay, what’s going on with the weather? We certainly seemed to need these this week.

We’ve made it to letter “u is an umbrella” before Spring Break, certainly a reason for celebrating. The children have done an amazing job, working very diligently week after week, to do their printing, alphabet crafts, and drawings and labels in their Alphabet Books. A few more weeks until we get to “z” and then we will be focusing on literature themes.

We welcomed Mrs. Bundic’s Grade Two class this week and last with their Reader’s Theatre presentation.

We’ve had a big focus on numeracy this term. We’ve been working on subitizing (recognising familiar number patterns such as dice formation), counting and creating sets using boxes of classrooms treasures and using 5 and 10 frames as frameworks to help us think about and organise our counting of numbers (eg., 3 and 4 is the same as 5 and 2). Here’s some work the children made this week to show different ways to make 7 using blocks.

We have finished painting our beautiful snowy owlets and to add to the “bird” theme, decided to make some baby penguins for a fun craft!

We would like to wish everyone a fun and sunny Spring Break!

Upcoming Events and Reminders

School re-opens for the Third Term on Monday, March 27.

Please return your report card envelopes in the week following Spring Break. We will recycle them for the final report card. The report card itself is yours to keep.

We will begin Dance in PE. All children should have running shoes to wear. Our first lesson will be on the Monday following Spring Break.

We’ve been quite this busy this week with a potpourri of activity.

This week saw us create “t is a tree,” thanks again to Pinterest. We made a few modifications with our “fruit,” using sparkling sequins. The Kindergarten has come to expect there will always be lots of glitter, sparkles and sequins in most crafts we do. It was a bit of a relief for the children to work on “t” as the simple straight lines are ones everyone can understand. We’ve had quite a few challenging letters lately, such as ‘q” and “s” which have lots of curves and circles. It’s a good reminder for all of us that it’s ok to take a step back and work on something simple, practise our skills and feel successful with our efforts.

We’ve almost finished all of our beautiful snowy owl paintings from Deep Space Sparkle. This was quite a feat for Kindergarten. Every student painted their backgrounds (pink or blue) at the same time; that means liquid tempera paint on all the tables and every Kinder child has a paintbrush. The next day, everybody painted their owls white. We’re pleased to report we had no spills or major mishaps to the carpet. We moved to small groups for the next phase which was painting the details such as yellow eyes, orange beaks, a brown branch and black for outlining and other finishing touches. Funnily enough, lots of children got paint on themselves this time.

In PE this term we have been learning to use small equipment such as bean bags, hoops, skipping ropes, frisbees and scarves. We learned how to safely use each piece of equipment during specific lessons. We’ve been focusing on staying in our personal space while moving around the gym, obeying whistle commands and cooperating with our small group in a station approach. We now have stations set up around the gym with specific tasks for each piece of equipment. Some fun dance music while we’re at each station has made it a lot of fun!

We met with our Big Buddies to continue working on our iMovies. We’ve completed the research and image collection and now we’ve moved on to the business of movie making. You’ll be able to read more about our digital literacy projects in our next post.

The Grade Two students in Mrs. Bird’s class also came to visit us on Wednesday with a Reader’s Theatre production from a Frog and Toad story. We were so pleased with the Kindergarten children’s attention and good manners throughout the student reading. We look forward to a visit from Mrs. Bundic’s Grade Two students next week.

This was really good practise for us as on Thursday we joined Grades 1-5 to watch an excellent play by Dreamrider Productions called “Zero Heroes.” In this story, Esmeralda and Goober, our heroes, taught us about the importance of reducing, reusing and recycling. “Use it for a minute and it’s garbage forever” was repeated to us several times.
-we all need to look at the amount of garbage we’re creating and try to reduce it
-we can refuse to purchase and use things which are disposable
-we need to compost our organic food waste and plant material in the Green Bin program
-buying things might be entertaining, but it doesn’t make us happy. Often, these one time purchases end up in the trash
-each thing we purchase uses up a piece of the earth: we take things from nature, turn it into a product through factories, use it once and then toss it into the dump
-all the purchases we make come with packaging and that is another thing for us to consider
-a litterless lunch is one positive step we can take to reducing the amount of garbage we create

Can you believe it’s already March? We cannot believe how fast we sped through February. But another month has gone by so of course we had to draw our Penguin self – portraits for March.

Upcoming Events and Reminders
We are meeting with parents who are interested in helping us to plan our Persian New Year celebration in Kindergarten. We are meeting in Mrs. Daudlin’s room on Monday at 8:15. This meeting is for parents only. Please arrange to have your child arrive at school with another parent. Children are not allowed to wait in the hallway.

Library is on Tuesday for both classes. Please remember to return your Library book.

Friday, March 10 is the last day before Spring Break. All students are going to be dismissed at 2 pm. Please mark this on your calendar. School resumes on Monday, March 27.

Ridgeview is sending home Second Term Report Cards on Friday, March 10. We are unable to send them home before that time if you are leaving early for Spring Break.

If you are going to be away before or after Spring Break, please inform us and the office.

We’re riding along a fast moving Alphabet Train as we finished “S is a snake this week.” These cutie snakes are a favourite as the children are very independent as they work on their individual designs.  We were really pleased with the children’s effort for the printed letter “s.”  It’s not easy with its curling backwards and forward motion but there was a lot of perseverance demonstrated in completing the assigned printing tasks.  Some of our more experienced printers have taken up our challenge to have all printed letters sit on the line, with consistent spacing and shape, and a sense of proportion between upper and lowercase letters.

We’re almost finished our second unit of instruction on Family in Social Studies.  This week we referred back to the family photos and accompanying notes from the children’s Sharing theme on “My Family” to talk about the favourite activities we do with our family.  Everybody chose the one that was most meaningful to them, drew a picture with our criteria of Big, Bright and Beautiful, and then dictated an accompanying sentence.

The next challenge was in sorting out our ideas and classifying them into different kinds of family activities:  celebrate together, read together, eat together, grow together were some of the labels we used.  The children understood each of the labels and decided where to sort their drawings.

Wednesday was double the fun as not only was it Pink Day (a focus in the Kindergarten on pro-social behaviours) and Big Buddy Day.

Thank you to everyone who helped their children find a pink or white shirt in support of Pink Day.  We read aloud What It Means to Be Kind by Rana DiOrio and Stephane Jorisch as our inspiration, but our children already have a very good concept about kind, gentle, polite behaviours.  They all understood that kindness does not mean buying or giving someone gifts.

Rather, we talked about, and put into action, some of these pro-social behaviours:

Saying “please,” “thank you” and “you’re welcome.”  “You’re welcome” was new for some students but we all know now to use that phrase following “thank you.”

Holding the door open for the student or adult behind us, and make sure we look behind us to ensure that person has a hand on the door.

At home some of the children have learned “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all,” and carefully explained that if you do not have kind words to say to another person, do not say anything.  You can say the words to yourself in your thoughts, but they do not come out of our mouth.

When another student or the teacher is clearly in need of help, it’s a kind gesture to go and offer or volunteer to help.  We have to say beyond a doubt, that this particular age group is among the most helpful we have ever found in our years of teaching.  We know we owe it to you, their parents, for having raised such socially conscious children.  Truly, Christy and I have more help from our children than we have little jobs for.  But the pleasure the children take from being “the teacher’s help” is enormous.

Wednesday morning also found us working with our Grade 7 Buddies on our digital literacy project, our penguin iMovies.  We’ve spent three weeks preparing for today, with two sessions on fact collection and one session on image collection before starting to create the iMovies, which will take a couple of weeks.  We have an upcoming blog about Kindergarten Digital Literacy:  the Next Step where we will describe the process in detail.

Friday was the big day that we all savoured with anticipation, waited patiently for and counted down the sleeps…Popcorn Day!  Popcorn Day is definitely an exercise in self-regulation.  The huge trays of popcorn bags we purchased on behalf of the children tempted us all late morning until mid-afternoon but not word was said by the children except how looking forward they were to eating theirs.  Thank you for supporting this Grade 7 Graduation Fundraiser.

Upcoming Events and Reminders

Please remember to wear (or have) runners at school for PE.  It’s not safe for the children to wear any other kinds of footwear besides runners in the gym.

Tuesday: Library Book Exchange.  Please remember to have your child bring his or her book into the classroom and place it in the Library Book Bin.  Although we ask everyone to check their backpack before we leave for the Library, some children do not know their book is in their backpack, only to find out after Library is over that their book was there the whole time!  As a result, those children were browsers during Library time and did not get to borrow a book.  The children should place his or her Library book in their backpack tonight or Monday night so they know the location of their book.  Although the children are just 5 years old, they are certainly ready for personal responsibility and independence in dealing with their Library book.

Thursday:  We are going to see DreamRider Productions “Zero Heros” on Thursday morning.  This production will focus on reducing waste, including food scrap composting; reusing and recycling and the impact of our actions today on tomorrow’s future.

Our week started with all things sweet and delightful…and we are definitely talking about the Kindergarten!

On Valentine’s Day, we were very busy helping our sweet young things with their precious Valentine’s cards for their friends.  We have to mention that we were very impressed with all of the printing of names which the children had independently completed.  Quite a feat, as we know all too well the time, effort and care required in printing neatly a class set of names.  All the cards were carefully tucked into the beautiful cardholders, with lots of treats and goodies, to take home and open and admire with families afterschool.  Since we’ve been teaching Kindergarten, we’ve decided to have the children open their Valentine cards at home.  Many children like to give a little gift with their cards, such as a chocolate or tiny box of stickers or tattoos.  We know how sad the children can become if they lose track of the cards and small treasures so it’s best that the card opening happen safely at home.

We had a delicious snack of cupcakes and fruit, thanks to our classroom parents.  And for the rest of the week many of our children kept saying how February 14 was “the best day ever” at school so it looks like our Valentine’s affair was truly a sweet memory.

We’ve so enjoyed the respite from the snow the past few days.  How easy it’s been just to switch to rainboots (and sometimes not even those) and a jacket for playtime.  We had a wonderful afternoon on Thursday with lots of children demonstrating their strength on the swings and how well they can “pump” after getting a big initial push from the teacher.

We’ve been having lots of fun with our Alphabet as we motor towards the last few letters.  This week was r is a rainbow” and the children loved colouring them in and reciting the colours in order.  As part of our Alphabet practise, we print the letter of the week in upper and lowercase, draw a few pictures beginning with that letter and label them.  We also do a lot of brainstorming, encouraging the children to look around the classroom for environmental print from the multiple alphabets we have up in the classroom, think of words in categories (animals that begin with “r”? food? sports? numbers?) or the objects around them.

The children love to print their own labels and we have really been emphasising over the last four weeks listening to the order of sounds in the words, particularly the CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words to spell words independently.  For example, cat what’s the first sound? “c,” the second sound “a,” and the last sound “t.”  We want the children to listen for those important first and last sounds of words.  It also gives us an opportunity to talk about spelling patterns such as -at.  We can generate a whole lot of words with that specific spelling patterns (bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat), but more practise with rhyme and manipulating the individual sounds in a word.  We want to develop the children’s phonological awareness to help them be successful readers and writers.  We’ve written about the importance of phonological awareness here.

Upcoming Events and Reminders

Library day on Tuesday!  Don’t forget to return your books for book exchange.

PE Days:  Division 15 (Monday/Thursday), Division 16 (Monday/Wednesday).  The children must have runners on these days!!

Pink Shirt Day on Wednesday, February 22.  The entire school is encouraged to wear pink shirts in recognition of anti-bullying.  A white is shirt is ok too.

Popcorn Sale on Friday, February 24.  The Kindergarten will be participating so please send in $1 sometime this week so we can pre-order a bag for your child.  It will be a fun Friday treat to have a popcorn snack outside with all of our Kindergarten friends.

Love is definitely in the air. We’ve been talking a lot about love these past few days.

To start off, there’s Big Buddy Love. Valentine’s Day is around the corner so on Wednesday we saw our beloved Grade 7 Big Buddies to make our beautiful Valentine cardholder bags. They are just gorgeous. We still really enjoy these kinds of crafts, using simple materials like paper bags, construction paper, glue and scissors. We did get a little fancy with the foam hearts and stickers.

Then there’s Classmates Love. Well, we need something to fill those cardholders so our children have been very busy printing Valentine’s at home for their classmates. We ask the children to bring a card for everyone (or at least all the girls or all the boys) so everybody feels good about their first Valentine’s Day at school. The children have been bringing in their finished Valentine cards for their friends and are so excited to be placing the cards in the bags. This is a new experience for many children, and an opportunity to talk deeply about friendship.

And now we can talk about Family Love. The Big Idea about Families in Kindergarten is that “Stories and traditions about ourselves and our families reflect who we are and where we are from.” We did some brainstorming about what it is we love about our families. Whether it be soccer, skiing or baking, the common thread through all of the children’s ideas is that they love to spend time with you. No wonder why people call it “the gift of time.” There’s never enough time to spend with the ones we love.

Upcoming Events and Reminders
Saleema Noon Parent Presentation on Wednesday, February 15th 6:30 at 8 p.m. in the library.

Library book exchange for both classes on Tuesday. Don’t forget to bring your books back and put them in the class book baskets.

Last call for February Scholastic Book Orders. Please return any orders by Tuesday, February 14.

We have started our next round of Sharing. Our theme is “Alphabet”. A schedule and information sheet are posted on the Parent Board.

Enjoy your Family Day weekend!