Friday, December 19 Spirit Day

This Friday will be a Spirit Day for Broadview. Students are invited to wear their PJs to school. Classes in each division with the highest participation will win the "Golden Boot" (a trophy that stays in the classroom until the next Spirit Day). Our class has already won a prize for the highest participation in the Food Drive and it would be great to keep the spirit going!


We have been alerted to the fact that there seems to be a delay between when these posts get written and when the email alerts of a new post are sent out. We are working on rectifying the problem. As I write this at noon on Wednesday, I am hoping that it reaches you before your child dresses for school on Friday! Just in case, I will send home a reminder in the notetotes as well.

Books coming home this week

I just wanted to write a quick explanation of an English book that will be coming home this week (if it hasn't already arrived!). During my small group lessons this week, children are working on a sight word book to reinforce our newest word wall word: "it". The last page of this book presents children an opportunity to do a bit of phonetic writing as well. Students were given a Christmas light popsicle stick reading pointer. They use this pointer to point to each word as they read to help them track and focus on each word. I'm sure they will be excited to share this activity with you at home.

Gingerbread Decorating Supplies

As part of the Open House Holiday Celebration this coming Friday, room 20 would like to share with you a very popular part of our program: Structures! Each week the students learn about a different kind of structure, and then with a partner or small group make a plan and then follow through to build that kind of structure. This week, we will be designing and building our structures with you when you visit on Friday, and to make it even more fun, they will be gingerbread houses!

We ask that each child bring a small quantity of candy (nut free) that can be shared amongst their classmates. If each child contributes, there should be a good variety in which to build our gingerbread structures!

Some suggestions are, but not limited to: smarties, mini-candy canes, Shreddies (for shingles), jube jubes, chocolate chips, nibs, watermelon jelly slices, sweet tarts, marshmallows...

We will be providing all other necessary ingredients and supplies. Please send the candies with your child to school on Friday morning so we can start set up before all of the parents arrive in the afternoon. If you also have a small plastic container/bowl that they can be put out in, please send it in labelled and we will make sure it gets returned to you. Thank you!

Urgent: Open House Update

Huge apologies that this is being sent so late! There was an overwhelming response on our blog survey to change the open house date to Friday December 12 and combine it with the holiday concert/party. Therefore, the open house that was originally scheduled for tomorrow December 2 has been cancelled. We hope to see you on December 12 at 2:00 instead.

Poll for Preference of Date for Open House and Concert Now LIve

Sorry parents! Thank you for bringing to my attention that the poll was not appearing properly on the blog. The problem seems to be fixed and the poll is now showing up on the right sidebar. Please take a moment to choose your selection for preference of date for our concert and open house. If you have already contacted us to let us know your vote, no need to do the poll. Thanks!

Weekly Update - November 17 - 28

It was so nice to meet so many of you at parent teacher interviews last week! Thank you for taking time to meet with us and discuss your lovely children!

News Items:

Monday November 24- Visit from Little Ray's Reptiles

Thursday November 27th - Room 20 Team away for Reaching In, Reaching Out training (our Building Resiliency project)

Friday November 28th - A visit from Jacqueline Lawlor (Noni's mom and guest guitarist)

**OPEN HOUSES:**
We would like to propose a possible change in date for our December Open House. We were thinking that we would like to make it more convenient for parents to arrange work schedules if we combined our Open House and our Holiday Concert on Friday December 12th at 2pm. Obviously if this is more inconvenient, we may leave the Open House date on December 2nd. Please take a quick minute to answer our poll on the sidebar of the blog.

Inquiries:

We are still interested in bones and pizza but this week we may have a strong focus on REPTILES! After seeing our presentation from Little Ray's Reptiles today, I think we will have many "wonders" on our wonder wall about reptiles and we may find this becomes a big inquiry in Room 20.

What We're Working On:

Math: Graphing using pictographs (Pizza topping preferences, dramatic play center preference, favourite reptile, etc)

Literacy: Focus on recognizing and writing colour vocabulary and how to write our own books! We will also be working more on our writing continuum. Some of you may remember seeing a "Bump it Up" wall (or "Echelle de succes" en francais) in our classroom. This wall has samples of student work at various levels of completeness which serves as a tool to help students "Bump up" their work and improve upon it as they go.

For more info about the writing continuum, please check out these sites:

http://www.otffeo.on.ca/en/resources/lesson-plans/early-years-writing-continuum/

http://www.eworkshop.on.ca/edu/resources/guides/Guide_Writing_%20K_3.pdf

Science: We are exploring with magnets (les ements)! 

Sensory Play: Rice and magnets.

Home Connection:

After interviews this week and many conversations with parents about what they can work on at home, we decided to start a "Sneaky Learning" section of our Home Connections tab. These are things you can do at home to work on some of the things we are doing at school. We will also include the number writing poems that Mrs. Steeves discussed with many of you during interviews. Check it out!

**We are also looking for the following recycled items for future crafts and projects:

-toilet paper rolls

-paper towel rolls\

-empty kleenex boxes

**Reminder: Please ask your child to leave their favourite toys, jewelry and other items at home. We have been having lots of tears and sad faces over lost or misplaced items. While we understand that they are special items and often the kids want to share them with their peers or their teacher, we would appreciate that they stay at home where they are safe and not a distraction to learning. Thanks for your help with this matter!

To Note for Thursday

Some of you may have noticed that no new library books were brought home today. That is because library is closed this week due to the Scholastic book fair happening in the library. Students will have a chance to visit the fair tomorrow morning. Other events for tomorrow include Crazy Hair/Clothes/Hat Day, and the Dance-a-thon. Students are invited to wear "crazy" items of their choice, and we will be visiting the gym in the afternoon in order to dance and participate in the Dance-a-thon school fundraiser. It'll be a busy, yet fun-filled day! We look forward to meeting with you during parent-teacher interviews in the evening and during the following day.

A couple quick reminders.. Update to follow

Hi Room 20 Parents!

Just a reminder that tomorrow is our Open House day!! Our open house begins at 9:30 ( to allow time for the students to come in and set up) and we will ask that you come observe during or lesson and then we encourage you to join in our centre time where we learn and explore through play! Looking forward to seeing many of you tomorrow!

Also, please note that our class will be going to the Scholastic Book fair in the school library at 10:40 on Thursday November 20th. 

**Lastly, please send your child in hats, mittens, snow pants etc that have their name in them to help us keep track of them. We will be playing outside every day so it is important that we are warmly dressed. Thank you!

Clarification

Just a quick note of clarification before our regular weekly update:

The progress reports that were sent home this week were for grades 1-8 only. 

Kindergarten students do not receive progress reports, but do have parent-teacher interviews.

A Note From Our Class Parent

Dear Parents,

 

I'd like to introduce myself to you as the Class Parent Rep for (Mme Byrd / Mme Steeves).  For those of you who don't know me, my name is Nickola, Matthew Hockey's mom.
 

The Class Parent Rep role is in its 5th year to Broadview P.S. and we are pleased about how well it has worked out.  As Class Parent Rep I am here to help welcome new students and their families to the school, and to help recruit volunteers for school-wide activities as needed throughout the year.  Amber and Jessica are supportive of my role as Class Parent rep and they will both be copied on all communication I send out to parents.  

 

I'm hoping that I can communicate to you without paper, and by email.  If I could kindly ask that parents reply to my email address with their full name(s), email address and home telephone number.  My email address is nickola@rogers.com.  

 

This is an exciting way to raise class room and school spirit and I'm thrilled to be part of it.

 

I look forward to hearing back from you.

 

Warmest Regards,

Nickola Hockey

Witches' Brew

As part of our Halloween activities on Friday, the children will be having the opportunity to participate in making  and tasting "Witches Brew"- aka pumpkin soup. If you have any concerns about this, please let us know.

Weekly Update- October 20- 24

News Items:

Check your child's note tote for songs in French that we have been singing in class!
Thursday: We will be away today for the first part of our 'Reaching In, Reaching Out' resiliency building training (we sent home a note about this earlier in the month).
Friday: Halloween! Your child is invited to come in costume but please no treats, 'weapons' or props with costumes that may get lost. Thanks!

**OPEN HOUSES:**
We would like to invite you to our first Room 20 Open House on Tuesday November 18th at 9:30. We would love for you to join us in the classroom and see what we are working on and how the day normally flows. In order to keep up our routines, we will have parents drop off the students in the kinder yard and give us a few minutes to come in and get settled. Then, parents are welcome to come in, browse, observe and participate!

We will have open houses once a month on the following dates:

Tuesday Dec. 2 afternoon

Tuesday January 13 morning

Thursday Feb 19 afternoon.

Hope to see many of you then!

Inquiries:

We are still interested in ocean life but this week we may have a strong focus on Halloween! The students were all starting to get excited this week for the upcoming holiday and asking to do Halloween crafts and activities. We will be turning the dramatic play center into a treak or treating and treat sorting and tallying center, equipped with a door and doorbell, "treats" (Halloween knick knacks), costumes, a mask making station and sorting and tallying equipment.

What We're Working On:

In math our focus this week will be on numeracy, more specifically on skip counting by 2s and 5s. If you would like to practice this at home that would be great! Our literacy focus will be on initial sounds of words in French.

Home Connection:
Please note that we will be putting a temporary pause on our sharing times. While we love having the kids share items of great importance to them or that have a connection with the inquiries we are exploring in class, there is an overwhelming amount of items sent in and unfortunately, this is causing conflict between the students and there are often disappointed and upset little monkeys who want to share that day and have to wait until the following days. We will be starting up show and tell in a more focused way in the coming months where we will send home a "script" to help guide the show and tell presentations. Sorry for any inconvenience and thank you for your support with this!

Some of you have been asking about the yoga videos the students are watching in class. Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/user/CosmicKidsYoga

 Our whole classroom has been turned into a yoga studio a couple times a week. The students have even made their own yoga mats! It is impressive to see!

Have a wonderful fall weekend with your kiddos!

A delayed update :)

News Items:

Check your child's note tote for songs in French that we have been singing in class!
Our library time may be changing due to immunizations in the library on Wednesday. Please return the books as usual and we will send home new library books Wednesday or Thursday depending on the change.

Inquiries:

We are still very interested in ocean life and under sea creatures. We have been watching interesting videos by Jonathan Bird while we eat lunch and the kiddos love them! If you would like to check it out, click on this link: www.blueworldtv.com .

What We're Working On:

In math our focus this week will be on reviewing what we have learned so far. We feel it is important to go back and review the various math concepts we have been working on to reinforce our learning and assess where the students are at. Our literacy focus will be on upper and lower case letters and the importance of using an upper case letter at the beginning of a name or start of a sentence and lower case letters everywhere else. Our outdoor centres will be include gardening, an outdoor kitchen center, an active game, reading center, making sound patterns with instruments and more!

Home Connection:
Please note that the system we created where three students a day share their items is working well but a few students seem to be sharing very frequently and others are unable to "sign up" in time to share their items. We are now keeping track of who shares when in order to give equal opportunity to all our students. If your child has a special item related to the inquiry we are exploring in class, they are still welcome to bring it in to share but please try to encourage them to think critically about which item they would like to share and help explain the importance of allowing others to share as well.

Also, if you have time, please work on having your child write their name and other peoples' names using lower case letters! Remember that name practice doesn't have to be done with a paper and pencil... Here are some fun ways to practice this even with less than willing young people ;)

Library

There was some confusion today regarding our library time stemming from the recent PD day and we missed out scheduled time. For this week only, we will go to the library on Friday. Our normal day of Wednesdays will resume next week.

Oceans Shared Reading

This past week in English literacy we did many literacy-based reading activities using the shared reading called Ocean. A shared reading is a large print song or poem in poster form read together and used to practice different reading skills. A copy of Oceans has been placed in your child's not wrote duo tang as well as an explanation of some of the activities we did so that you can recreate them at home. Enjoy your extra long weekend!

Reminder

Don't forget that today is spirit day! We encourage all of our students to wear red, black and white!

Spirit Day Thursday

We wanted to write a quick note to tell all of you that this Thursday, October 9, is a Broadview Spirit Day. For this day, student council is asking all students wear Broadview colours: black, red and white. Recognition will be awarded to classes with the highest participation rate.

Weekly Update #4

News Items:

This week is a four day school week. Friday is a PD Day and there is no school for students. Monday October 13th is also a holiday. 

Inquiries:

At the end of last week we started to be very interested in ocean life and under sea creatures. We will be following the students' lead this week coming up and learning about the ocean, ocean animals, and sea shells and coral. 

What We're Working On:

In math our focus this week will be on shapes and patterning. We will start by working on simple ABAB patterns and work our way up to more complicated ones. Our literacy focus will be on letter recognition and sounds of letters, as well as letter formation an writing simple words around the room. Our outdoor centres will be super fun and will include a pattern obstacle course, leaf patterning, pumpkins and gourds floating in our sensory bin, gardening and leaf collection.

Home Connection:

If your child wants to bring in some sea shells or other ocean related items to share, please encourage them to do so. Please note that we have created a system that three students a day will share their items and if we have more "sharings", we will ask some students to share the following day or we will ask them to leave their items at re science centre to be viewed and explored by their classmates. 

Some parents have been asking for the Rock Cookie recipe that Mrs. Steeves made with the kiddos last week. Here it is!

3/4 cup butter, softened

1cup powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla 

1 tsp almond extract 

2 1/4 cups of flour 

1/4 tsp salt 

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375F. Mix all ingredients together until the dough is well incorporated. Form into rock shapes. (Makes about 8 3-4" cookies)

Bake on greased cookie sheet for 10 mins or until they begin to brown. Remove from the oven and cool completely. 

Combine 1 cup powdered sugar, 1 tbsp mill, 1drop black food coloring, and a tiny drop of green food coloring together until you have reached your desired consistency. Using a basting brush, paint glaze onto cookies until evenly spread. 

Enjoy eating rocks! :)

Have a wonderful week and enjoy the long weekend! Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it! 

Weekly Update #3.. oops a little late!

Hi parents,


Sorry for the delay with last week's weekly update. Internet problems at home made it a bit tricky to get it posted on time and then life got away from me! Our students wrote you this message with Mrs. Steeves on Friday:

News Items:

-Library books due back this Wednesday

-Picture day is this week- October 2nd

-Picture retakes are on November 5th and class photos will be taken on the 5th as well

-Next Friday October 10th is a PD Day and October 13th is Thanksgiving.

Inquiries:

This week, our students expressed interest in rocks! We learned about igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks and how they are made, we talked about attributes of rocks an learned the colour words to describe them. We sorted rocks based on their attributes, learned about and made Inukshuks, and much more!!

We are starting to see a lot of interest in ocean life and we will be following the students' lead with this next week. 

Outdoor Learning:

Outdoor learning centres were in French last week and sorted items, made small Inukshuks, expired water and colours in our sensory table, and sorted nature items by size. 

Home Connections:

If your child would like to send in any "ocean" related things next week we would love to display them at our science centre. 

We will be working on patterning next week in math and would love for ou to practice at home! Ask your child to find patterns in your home, while walking to school or elsewhere in their world. You will be amazed with what they come up with!!

Weekly Update #2

News Items:

Library Day is this Wednesday :)

Inquiries:

This week, our students started to express interest in rocks and crystals, with many bringing in collections from home or found items to share with the class. We are going to pursue this interest in the coming weeks with outdoor centres (Inukshuk building, sorting rocks), in our sensory table (an archeology dig), through literacy activities (writing names and words with letter rocks and writing a rock report) and through math centres (measuring and comparing rock towers). Can't wait to see where our inquiries lead!

Home Connections:

If your child has a special rock, crystal, fossil or rock collection they would like to show the class please feel free to send it in!

We have been working on writing our names and the names of our other friends in the class and we would  love if you could continue to work on lower case letters and writing names with appropriate case at home! 

Pictures:

Here are a couple pictures of some of the things we have been working on so far :)

Literacy Centres: Identifying and using lower case magnet letters to spell familiar names.

Literacy Centres: Recognizing and Swatting lower case "Letter Flies".

Math Centre: Learning about and exploring the concept of "ten". Demonstrating understanding of numbers up to ten. Students glued on the appropriate number of items in each square. 

Outdoor Centres: Learning about mapping. Drawing maps (legends included!) of our school yard.

Another great week! Thanks for all of your support in the last few weeks! 

Weekly Update #1

What a great first full week of school! We are finally starting to get into the swing of things and we are having a great time in Room 20 J. The following is a little weekly update about what we have been doing.

News Items:

We went to the library for the first time this week. Wednesdays will be our library day (library books should preferably be returned by Tuesday so that we have all of them on library day) and students will bring rotate between borrowing French and English books.

This Wednesday September 17^th is our Meet the Teacher night from 6:00-7:00pm. As we have just met with most of you, please don’t feel you need to attend. However, if you were unable to make it to the intake interview, Mrs. Steeves and I will both be available to meet with you. We will be splitting our time between our kindergarten room and our Core French and ETFI rooms in order to meet those parents as well.

Inquiries:

This week, our students expressed interest in pond life (inspired I’m sure by our little pet frog) and creepy crawlies! Many different caterpillars and bugs made their way into our classroom and we observed them and asked lots of questions! More on that to come!

Outdoor Learning:

Outdoor learning centres were in French this week and began slowly as we introduced the program, the rules and our expectations. We collected nature items found in the yard and using large frames we wrote our names with the found items!

Home Connections:

We would love if you could work on lower case letters at home! We will be working on them in class as well and focusing on making sure we write our names using lower case letters.

We are so looking forward to the next week with the kiddos! 

A Successful First Week... and a Poll for Parents

What a great first week! Only a couple days of SK but they were good ones! We are so excited for the rest of the school year! We worked hard these past couple days getting to know each other and the rules and routines of our classroom. We will continue to practice them next week. 

Today we reviewed some things like our classroom jobs. Every student in Room 20 has a job to do. Our job chart highlights 11 different jobs that the students rotate through in pairs and do for the week. We let you know this so that when your child comes home and tells you their job is to scrub the tables, you understand that each child has a weekly job, not that they are having some sort of unusual punishment :)

The jobs are as follows: 

-Line leader

-Materials manager

-Mini-teacher

-Frog Feeder

-Librarian

-Table Scrubber

-Chair pusher

-Garbage & Recycling

-Cubby Inspector (tidy & organize cubby area)

-Centre Inspector (checks to make sure every centre is tidied properly)

-Vacation (A week off from classroom jobs!)

Thanks to a curious young friend who brought in a very cute and fuzzy caterpillar, we started a neat inquiry at our science centre about caterpillars! We had lots of questions like: Will it make a cocoon? Will it become a butterfly or a moth? What does it need to live? This weekend, Mme Byrd, Mrs. Steeves, Mme Gilda and Mme Shanna will be looking for good books on caterpillars and planning fun things we can do to learn more about our fuzzy new friend!

Have a great weekend!

PS- We have added a quick poll for parents to complete in the right sidebar. Please take a second to answer the question there. Our blog is currently open to the public. We were thinking that some parents may not feel comfortable if we post pictures of their child on an open blog. This blog can easily be made private- meaning it would only be viewable to Broadview parents after they sign in. While this would require you to do another step, it would allow us to freely post pictures of what is going on in our classroom. Please let us know your thoughts! If you have concerns or questions not answered by the poll please do not hesitate to contact us!

First Day of School!!

What a wonderful first day of school! It was so nice for Mme Byrd and Mrs. Steeves to get to spend more time with our new SK friends! We really enjoyed seeing our kiddos explore their new environment and start to get to know each other. We spent lots of time practicing routines and learning each others' names. We were engaged in play at all of the classroom centres, we fed our (yet to be named) frog, practiced tidying up and even worked on a special Superhero Self Portrait where we made super heroes that look like us and added our super hero powers. 

We look forward to another great day tomorrow!

Ps- some parents have been asking about the Giving Tree. The list posted on the blog differs from the list we had in the class during intake interviews because we didn't have a copy at home to post to the blog. We do silly stuff like that sometimes :) needless to say, all items are needed.

Welcome! Bienvenue!

We were so happy to meet the rest of our Room 20 friends today!

We are so looking forward to the first full day of school tomorrow and we can't wait to play, laugh and explore with all of you! We hope that your 'magic ball' wishes all came true! We made wishes too and we think they will definitely come true!!

See you tomorrow morning! Look for an orange pylon with a flag that says "Mme Byrd" to know where to line up in the kindergarten yard. 

P.S- Some parents have been asking that we post our 'Giving Tree' on the blog. Check out the new tab above!

Daily Schedule and a little Welcome

We were so excited to meet these students today!

And we can't wait to meet the rest of our new friends tomorrow!!

As promised at today's open house, here is the daily schedule (on a two week rotation) for our students in Room 2! 

Sneak peek at Room 20- your child's new classroom!!

Hello parents!

Hopefully by now your child has received our letter in the mail welcoming them to our classroom. We are so excited to meet all of our students and their families. We are in the school all this week working on preparing a really exciting, engaging classroom where your children will feel safe and comfortable and enjoy exploring every day. Check out the "Our Classroom" tab above to see more photos and info of Room 20. Our classroom will be an ever changing space but this is it so far!

Xo Mme Byrd &   Mrs. Steeves