Sunday, March 30, 2014

Week of March 31-April 4

Dear families,

Spring has sprung in our classroom and this week we did a lot of work to that wonderful theme. We did a lot of student-directed inquiry this week and the children's answers to the questions were wonderful: how do seeds get to the ground? How do plants grow? What are seeds? Which parts of plants do we eat? What foods are red, green, etc.? What do plants need? How do plants make seeds? Next week we will plant our bean seeds and cross our fingers that they all germinate (I have lots of extras though!).

With our Grade 3 Reading Buddies we read and wrote a booklet called "I Know It's Spring" and started another booklet called "Here is a..."

The SK homework for this weekend is to complete the page "Foods Come in Many Colours." The JKs completed a healthy food counting page and both JKs and SKs also finished their labelled parts of a plant. If you are in the school, have a look at our new hall bulletin board display!

The SKs also completed an "I like rain because.../I don't like rain because..." sentence. It was cute!

We are reading several Spring/plant/seed books and I think the children are finding this unit interesting!

I brought in some common fruits and vegetables we eat (carrot, potato, cucumber, tomato, grape, celery, broccoli) and some of the children asked if they were real! The children seemed intrigued by the fact that these everyday foods are different parts of plants (root, tuber, fruit, stem, flower). We made an "Itsy Bitsy Fruit Book" (the kids love those Itsy Bitsy books!) and wrote (SKs) and cut-and-paste (JKs) Spring Words. We were busy this week!

This week we will do more Spring-themed activities. The tulip and daffodil stems and leaves are peeking out of the ground in front of the kindergarten classrooms and this time of the year provides many wonderful opportunities to learn about our natural world.

Thank you to Lauren's dad and Kate's dad who were our Mystery Readers this week. Thank you to Cole's mom and Lexa's mom who did the morning class white bags and snuggle books.

We also did a lot of work on the SmartBoard this week - compared height, letter shapes, and answered our questions of the day (eg. Did you wear boots to school today?).

I hope you have a wonderful week!