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!