Thursday, April 18, 2019

Week of April 15-19

Dear families,

Spring has sprung in room 166! I hope you are having a wonderful Easter weekend with family and friends! This week we continued our inquiry on the Earth and how to take care of it, as well as learning about rabbits and Signs of Spring.

For our inquiry about how to take care of the Earth, the children are learning the "Three Rs" -- recycle, reuse, and reduce. They learned about the triangle- shaped symbol for recycling plastic and are learning what goes into the recycling bin. We watched a "How It's Made" (my favourite tv show! :)) video about how plastic bottles are made into polyester fibre and made into clothing. We also watched a "SCISHOW KIDS" video about recycling and

With our Reading Buddies, the children finished their Spring booklets and started a "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" booklet. We talk about recycling from the start of JK and reuse a lot of materials in Kindergarten, so these concepts are very familiar to the children. They are just learning the vocabulary! The children are working on a "colour-by-number" Earth, and made a "Happy Earth Day" wheel of knowledge. The kids are continuing to bring in their toys and crafts made from recyclable materials. They are great and they love explaining how they made them.

The children completed their "This is me in April" and the April calender. They also learned a poem called "I Love the Earth" and a song called A-P-R-I-L.

During our daily quiet meditation time the children held feathers, which is helping with their self-regulation skills. This quiet time also frees Mrs. Mopsun and myself up to do important one-on-one assessment and reading with the children.

Please send in another hollow egg. We will be reusing it as a container to plant a seed. Thank you!

The words of the week were DOWN and WHO.

A big THANK YOU to the moms of Elise, Ella, Mila, Sophie and Shay who volunteered their time, energy and materials for our very successful Spring Craft Party on Wednesday! The children made a beautiful 3-D collage, decorated eggs, made chick and egg puppets, and origami flowers! They also enjoyed the yummy treats that the moms brought in!

Thank you also to Rajan who shared his awesome book about coding, Casey's dad who was this week's Mystery Reader, and former students of mine Claire (Elise's sister!) and Samantha who were also Mystery Readers! A big thank you to Abigail who very kindly brought in Easter treats for all her friends. They were in plastic eggs so we had an impromptu Easter Egg Hunt in the classroom!

After the long weekend we will be learning about insects.


That's the news for this week - have a wonderful weekend! See you on Tuesday.