Calendar books

Many of you may have noticed that our calendar in class is different than others you have seen.  It is all done by the students.  We use this type of calendar to talk about our day and a way to see what the students have discovered and learned that day.

But what to do once a month finishes and we have all of these pictures and writing for each day?  Well, we made books!  Ms. R has been wonderful at helping us create these books from September to December, and will now be continued every month.  We keep them on our book shelf and catch many students looking at them daily. Take a look below.

The December title page shows when we went into the gym every morning to sing holiday carols with the school.  This and the other title page ideas were all thought of by the students drawing them.

 This is an example of a page inside our books.  It shows our writing of what we discovered, did or learned that day and a picture.  We do this every day on our class calendar.

Apologies for the pictures being side ways. :)

Yoga continued...

We wanted to share what some students have been up to during activity time in class: yoga!  Many students are choosing to go to the yoga centre independently now to relax and do some yoga.  We love seeing this!

 In fact, some students are even beginning to do their own yoga classes with their peers!

2 Dimensional Shapes

We began 2 dimensional shapes last week.  The students have been loving our shape centres during math and activity time. We will be doing more with shapes in way of math, writing and art; including introducing the artist Wassily Kandinsky!

 We've also had a few students begin to explore further with shapes; like using the shapes they know to create more shapes!  For example, this students was able to make a triangle and then add two more sticks to make a trapezoid, a small triangle and a long trapezoid.

Ice Inquiry

In Science, we have begun a new inquiry all about ice!  The students are loving it.  So far, we have experimented with ice freezing outside in different temperatures, coloured ice, melting and mixing ice with other solutions, like shaving cream.  

We hope to begin more experiments ice and different objects and solutions, temperature and art with ice!

Meditation and Yoga

In December, we began to practice meditation and yoga in class.  We found many of the students full of energy after lunch, making it hard to concentrate on math and other afternoon lessons and activities.  Since starting this, the students have been a lot more relaxed, calm and able to concentrate during whole group lessons.  

We will be creating a yoga centre in class next week which will include yoga mats and different poses to give a space to relax throughout the day.

Hotel

This week we brainstormed some new ideas to turn our dramatic play centre into.  The students came up with some amazing ideas including a vet office, airport, pet store, supermarket and a hotel.  We made a graph with our top choices and voted on which we wanted to change the centre into.  Majority of the students chose a hotel, which we will begin to create next week.

Patterning continued

We still continue to explore patterning in math.  The students love using different manipulatives and objects from around the classroom and outside to create different types of patterns.  We are continuing to learn that a pattern repeats and that the same type of pattern can be represented with all sorts of objects.  

We even did a pattern hunt throughout the classroom and school this week!

Thank you for the donations!

We would like to send a big THANK YOU to Zoe, Alex and their family for the wonderful toy donations!  We got to look through all the wonderful toys this week and the students have been loving them!

Welcome back!

Welcome back!

Happy New Years to all our students and their families!

We hope you all had a restful and enjoyable holiday.  It feels great to be back in the classroom and the first week has gone great!

Ms. Russell will not be back as she is about to have her baby.  We welcome Ms. R, who is supplying for Ms. Russell, until the ECE position is filled.  She has worked in our class several times and is absolutely wonderful with the students!

Your Partners in Learning,
Ms. Stefanoff and Ms. R

Student made Number Wall

Everyday we are working with numbers, whether it's counting forward, backwards or skip counting, or writing numbers--we are working with numbers all the time!  So this week we created a number wall, which was made by the students.  It was a great way to have the students show what they have been learning into a project to benefit our class.

During activity time, those students who were interested, came to help create each number sheet. Junior and Senior Kindergartens worked together on this.

As you can see the number wall has turned out amazing!  We could not be happier!  The students have loved it and are using it each day during math and activity time.