October 28, 2011

Dear Family,

Hi!

It was brought to my attention that the Kinderstar schedule is incorrect on our November calendar. Please note on your calendars that your child’s Kinderstar is the following day rather than the scheduled day. (For example, Eric is on Monday Oct. 31, Grace is on Tuesday Nov. 1^st, Aadi is on Nov. 2 and so on).

 In lieu of saving trees, I thought we could just switch our calendars instead of wasting 24 pieces of paper. Thanks so much! (and… sorry for the mistake!!)

 Take care and have a great weekend!

Ms. Jo-Anne and Mr. Kneebone

PS… remember to send your child’s Halloween costume to school in a plastic bag on Monday please!!!! Do not send your child to school in his or her costume or with any accessories. Thanks so much, its going to be a “boo-ti-ful day”!!!

Hi!.. I had a hard time sending this last night…so here  is this morning!!!

 

Just a note about mittens and gloves… We noticed at the end of the day that a few children went home with one mitten or glove…SORRY!!!!!!!!!!! We will encourage the children to put their mittens and gloves in their sleeves of their coats or in their pockets rather than in their lockers. This will help us all remember to take mittens and gloves home at the end of the day. I found a few of our friends’ mittens and gloves in their lockers at the end of the day. Don’t worry, they are not lost! We will be more diligent in helping our friends with this too. Thanks for your patience with this!  🙂

Please take a few minutes to label your child’s clothing, thanks!

Today:

Our day was very busy today, it just flew by!!! We had library and computers in the morning and this worked out really nicely. We will keep our combined period, it makes for a shorter computer time but the children still have 30 minutes to explore the programs in the computer lab, as well they have plenty of time to work on the  Ipad in our classroom.  The boys and girls enjoyed playing on A to Zap. Next week we will begin Plumo at the Zoo..a program that supplements our math program: matching, sequencing to name a few of the activities we will begin with.

Today we continued to finish our pumpkins! Take a look at our bulletin board and tree so far! The children are taking their time to paint, colour and cut…further developing their fine motor skills.

We introduced the  “Listening Centre” today. We first listened to the story, “Pick a Pumpkin, Ms. Millie” which is a story about a silly teacher who uses words incorrectly, for example, when they are at the pumpkin patch, she tells the children they are going on a “dragon” ride instead of a wagon ride. This really is a silly book and we thought it was very funny! Not to mention that it was a great phonemic awareness activity..rhyming words will be something we listen for and talk about a lot this year!

The children had a chance to listen to the story at our listening centre, it was fun to listen to them laughing as they enjoyed hearing the story again with a friend!

The children also had a chance to “help” Mr. Kneebone and Madame Scarfo carve our class Jack-o-lantern. Mr. Kneebone had plenty of helpers and they did a fabulous job! I think our class jack-o-lantern looks exactly like the paper jack-o-lantern, don’t you?

 

One more activity to tell you about…the children also measured the circumference of our class pumpkin, using string to measure. We talked about the string being too short, too long or just right…I explained to the children that they could explore this numeracy concept during playtime and it was so incredible seeing the children explore and use these mathematical words with friends. Play-based learning is so amazing to watch!!!

Speaking of which…

Parent Volunteers!

It is time for you to join us!!!

I will be organizing parent volunteers starting in the second week of November. I will send a form home with your child in Mr. Zippy. Please let me know if the date I have given you works or not (based on the information you gave to me at our intake interviews in September). Some tasks you might expect to do in the classroom:

work with students,

read with students

do cutting and gluing jobs for us

organizing

playing

working on crafts with children

playing games with children

Thanks so much for your time!

Thanks for reading!

Ms. Jo-Anne 🙂

Hi!

Just a reminder that tomorrow is Day 1 and we will be trying our new schedule of having library exchange and computers in the morning! I think it will work out well! Please send your child’s library book back tomorrow if you haven’t done so yet!

We will be exploring A to Zap again in the computer lab! This is a great program to continue introducing the alphabet and letter sounds in a fun way!

That’s it for tonight!

Thanks for reading, have a great night!

Ms. Jo-Anne 🙂

Hi!

On Monday October 31st, we will be celebrating Halloween! Please send your child to school with his or her costume in a plastic bag in his or her backpack. Feel free to dress your child in orange and black too if you want.

Do NOT send your child to school wearing his costume please. I ask that all swords, guns and accessories like masks stay at home so they do not get lost or broken before your “trick or treating” at night.

We will be having a Kindergarten Parade with ALL of the kinder students at WEJ in the morning! This is going to be so much fun!

Mr. Kneebone and I have some fun activities planned for our students including Halloween games and stories and a yummy snack of “orange and white” spooktacular fruit salad!!!  We will have plenty of play time and a special Halloween video in the gym with our entire Kinder students to end our day!!!

Hopefully our children won’t be too tired (or wired :)) by the time they get home to you to go trick or treating with you!

Please feel free to contact us in your child’s Mr. Zippy if you have any questions or concerns!!!

Take care!

Ms. Jo-Anne (Can you guess what I will be for Halloween???)

 

 

 

Do you think our pumpkin was heavier or lighter than our students?

If you guessed….lighter, you are RIGHT!  Today the children did some estimating “guessing” about how much our pumpkin weighed. We had all sorts of guesses from 1-100 pounds…. I explained to the children that there is no “wrong” guess, just some are closer to the right answer than others. Well…our class pumpkin weighs…9 pounds! We had one student estimate that our pumpkin weighed 10 pounds, what a close estimate!!!!

We weighed it on my bathroom scale! After we did this we decided it would be fun to see if our pumpkin weighed more or less than our friends. After weighing some of our friends who weighed between 28 and 33 pounds…we decided that our class pumpkin was LIGHTER than us!  The children were really thinking about these math concepts: lighter, heavier, more and less. Super job!

Does a pumpkin float or sink?

If you said…it depends on how much water is in the water table…you are right! Using an inquiry base approach, we placed 2 pumpkins in our water table (our first day our water table was open) and asked the children to tell us what they found. Only having a small amount of water in the table, we discovered our pumpkins did infact sink. However, with many more buckets of water, we found that our pumpkins began to float.

Why???

Because…the pumpkin floats because its mass is less than the mass of water it displaces. This happens because the inside of the pumpkin is hollow. It is mostly air, which has a much lower mass than water.

 

 

Jack-o-lantern Planning with Mr. Kneebone

We also voted on how we wanted to carve our pumpkin….Mr. Kneebone cut out a variety of shapes of eyes, noses and mouths and as a group, we decided, using “majority rules”, what our class jack-o-lantern would look like. We will be doing this tomorrow once we measure the circumference or how wide our class pumpkin is. We will use pieces of yarn to do this! So much fun! We will also cut open our pumpkins at the Nature Table tomorrow and explore! Our children did not choose to go the Nature table today so we decided to wait to cut our pumpkins tomorrow!

Here are a few pictures from play time. The children are so happy and enjoying learning at our many of centres. It is wonderful to observe and hear the language that comes from play.

Thanks for reading!!!

Ms. Jo-Anne 🙂

Hi!

Thank-you to the families who donated pumpkins for our “Nature table”. We have a great assortment of pumpkins, varying in size! We didn’t get a chance to open them up today, so we will cut the tops off them tomorrow and let the exploring begin! We are going to talk about all of the parts of a pumpkin: including skin, seeds, pulp, fibrous strains (also known as the “yucky parts”).

We do not need any more pumpkins at this point, thank-you so very much to the families who sent in a pumpkin today!!!:)

So what did we do today?

Our day started off with learning the poem, “Five little Pumpkins”. I introduced this shared-reading poem using my fingerplay glove! The boys and girls loved it! Then we had the children act it out, using our pumpkin pillows! They really seemed to enjoy this and they especially loved the part, “ooooooh went the wind and (clap) out went the lights and 5 little pumpkins rolled out of sight”.

Then we had play time where we painted paper plates to make pumpkins with  me. We painted 2 paper plates orange and tomorrow we will stuff them with newsprint and put stems on them for our bulletin board. The children used sponges to do this which added a perfect texture look! The children also had a choice to make  pumpkin lanterns that kind of  look like ghosts! haha! The boys and girls did a fabulous job colouring and cutting these with Mr. Kneebone, they look “spooktacular in our class tree”. I’ll take a picture tomorrow to show you!

During this time, the children also had a chance to play in our house corner that is looking rather “spooky”, write Halloween words at our Writing Centre and discover bones and Halloween shapes in our popcorn centre. Many of the children played on the carpet with the toys, puzzles and the reading centre is one of the favourite choices as well. They love to read to Coco!!!

 Mr. Kneebone has been teaching the children “story telling ” where they work together to create stories, using oral language, with beginnings, middle and endings. He has used the Ipad to work on this skill with the children and today he used our white board with the children. We are hoping to see the children increase their confidence to try story writing at the writing centre . We are encouraging them to start by using pictures and to “tell” us about their stories and we can write their ideas for them! Thank-you Mr. Kneebone! You are awesome!

The boys and girls enjoyed both outside play times outside as the rain held off! Our day ended with  Calendar Time, Table tops, Snack and French with Madame Scarfo! The children enjoyed learning the alphabet in French as well as singing their songs with Madame!

…Mondays are great in JK!

Thanks for reading!

Ms. Jo-Anne 🙂

Hi!

Wasn’t that quite the windy, blustery, rainy, then sunny, then cloudy day???

 Well despite the unpredictable weather today, it worked out perfectly for us as we were able to go outside at both scheduled outdoor play times! Yay!

 

It was a great day, I am happy to say we had 2 very good play times, the children played very well and completed their pumpkin counting activity, painted pumpkin pictures at the painting centre, played puzzles with Mr. Kneebone and played cooperatively and shared the toys at our various centres!…and it was an exceptional day because all of our friends listened to their bodies and used the washroom when they needed to and we had no accidents! Yay!!! This is very normal at the beginning of JK and please don’t worry if your child has an accident, we are here to help the children and teach them to listen to their bodies while they play!:)

We have been talking about pumpkins and more specifically how they grow. We read a cute story about Pooh growing a pumpkin! This is one of my favourite books to read, Pooh gets very confused about growing a pumpkin because he doesn’t know that first the pumpkin starts out as a seed, then a vine, then a flower which turns into a small green ball and then eventually it grows into a big orange pumpkin! Not only does the pumpkin grow, but so does Pooh’s tummy as he has eaten so much honey as he sits and watches and takes good care of his pumpkin!!

 

 

Just a “few” details about next week:

1) Friday October 21 is a PA day, there is no school for students! I hope the children (and you too) have a wonderful 3 days together. I believe that the children really deserve an “extra” day off as they have been working so hard here at school. We try to make the learning fun but let’s face it, every day, all day is exhausting for 3 and 4 year olds! They are doing so well at following rules and routines, printing their names, listening, raising their hands, sharing and learning letters and numbers! I wish my little friends a happy day off!

2) Scholastic Book order forms and cheques are due to school on Tuesday October 24th, please.

3) Picture Retakes are on Friday October 28th. Please send in your envelope if you are choosing to do this on Friday.

4) Due to the reorganization of our school, our French,gym, computers and library times have changed. I will send a copy of our new schedule at the end of next week when I send out November’s calendar. Thanks for your patience with this as we learn our new schedule and make it work for our students!

5) Having said that… Library Day is on Day 1 which is on Thursday October 27th. I am going to try to do library and computers during the same period and we’ll see if that works out or not.

 Next Week’s Plan:

We will continue to talk about the lifecycle of a pumpkin, including doing a science sequencing activity. We are putting out a pumpkin at our nature table and we will be having the students feel and explore the insides of pumpkins. (Don’t worry, we will have gloves if needed!) We will paint pumpkins for our pumkin patch, learn our poem “5 pumpkins sitting on a gate” and “Jack O Happy” and talk about the letter Pp. We will be making jack-o-lanterns and ghost lanterns and by the end of the week we will begin talking about Halloween!! We will be making our “house corner” into a Halloween House over the week too! Can’t wait!

I will have details about our Halloween celebration to you on Monday! We will be asking the children to bring in their costumes in plastic bags, please no accessories (like swords, guns etc). Thanks!

If you would like to donate a pumpkin(any size) to our nature table, please feel free to send a pumpkin with your child or drop it off at the office.

Thanks! 🙂 Please let me know on the blog if you don’t mind, that way we don’t end up with 24 pumpkins! haha!

Have a wonderful weekend! Mr. Kneebone and I will be working together with our Kinderteam to further our learning and professional growth! We look forward to seeing the boys and girls back at school on Monday!

Ms. Jo-Anne 🙂

Hi!!

One of our students in grade 4 has initiated a project called “Milk Bags to help Haiti“.

The milk bags are made into sleeping mats and are quite amazing. There is a box in the front foyer to drop off your milk bags (washed please) or feel free to send them in “Mr. Zippy”.

Isn’t this an incredible initiative?

Let’s help out! Thanks so much for your continued support!

Ms. Jo-Anne and Mr. Kneebone 🙂

Hi!

Today was a really great day! All the days are great but today was filled with a lot of  play time which makes us all so happy!!!!! The learning that happens during our centre time is incredible. From planning and being accountable to where they would like to play, to working in social situations, learning to share and talk with friends, not to even mention the literacy and numeracy skills that are developing … just to name a few!

Just a few highlights from today:

Our Kinderstar today took the attendance down to the office carrying our pumpkin bag and chose a friend to go with her, wearing the pumpkin hat. Too cute! It is the small things that make children happy, don’t you think?

Another really special moment was when one of my little friends realized that he could print his name on his own, using an upper case letter and then all lower case letters, INDEPENDENTLY! He was so proud of himself and was so excited that he wrote is name! I was so proud too and Mrs. Heleno, one of our SK teachers, had stopped in to show some me some work from my students from last year (we love to praise and show off our amazing students)and she saw how happy were were and came right over to see what was going on! She said, ‘Oh Jo-Anne, take his picture, that is amazing!!!”

So here it is…pictures say a 1000 words, don’t you think?

Have a wonderful evening!

PS I will have information regarding our Halloween activities that we have planned for you soon. We will definitely be asking the children to bring in a costume (in a plastic bag) for our celebration. We just ask that swords and wands and anything like that stay at home. More to come soon! 🙂

Ms. Jo-Anne 🙂

Hi!

One more reminder…

The teachers at WEJ are hosting our annual “Meet The Teacher”  tomorrow night (Tuesday October 18). The JK classes are NOT participating in this event because we had the chance to meet all of our wonderful parents (you!) at our Intake Interviews in September.

Just thought I’d mention that to you in case you were wondering!!!

Thanks so much!

Ms.Jo-Anne 🙂