Week of June 11-15

Dear families,

I hope you are having a wonderful Father's Day weekend! The children have taken great care in making gifts for their dads for this special day.

This week we continued our learning about frogs and also read several fictional books about frogs. The kids enjoyed learning how to draw "Froggy" and also labelled a picture of a frog. They learned more about metamorphosis and made a Frog Life Cycle wheel. They learned how frogs and toads are different watching a video on the Smartboard, completed a lower case alphabet activity on a picture of a toad, we read some classic "Frog and Toad" tales (thank you, Hudson!), and learned that frogs come in many colours and sizes. Thank you Alex and Hudson for sharing your frog toys! They look so real! We also did a Fact vs. Opinion activity together: the children had to decide if statements were a fact ("frogs are amphibians") or an opinion ("frogs are cute"). We read "Froggy Builds a Treehouse," Froggy's Worst Playdate" and "Froggy's Birthday" and the children did a good job re-telling the stories from beginning to end. We also listened to a CD of "The Frog Prince."

We finished our Cinderella story study this week. The kids read and coloured a Cinderella booklet, played an alphabet game with Cinderella cards ("I have A, who has B?" etc.) and completed three tricky alphabet and number mazes. We also read a Cinderella Sight Word Book and the children completed their own, copying many sight words in lower case letters. Good job!

The children also completed their June calendar and wrote and drew a picture of "This is me in June." They also wrote and drew adorable pictures with their Reading Buddies about what they want to be when they grow up!

Our Mystery Reader this week was Hope's mom. Thank you! The words of the week were EAT and STOP. The homework for this week is to do the mini "WE" booklet. Next week's words will be VERY and X-RAY. Elea, Hudson, Lily, Ethan and Evelyn were very proud of the "Piggy Pies" they made at home and shared photos of them. I love it when the children continue their learning outside the classroom! Mia made Piggy Pie in the sandbox :)

It's a very exciting time of the year as summer approaches (we've started our ice cream scoop countdown!) and we've been doing Cosmic Kids Yoga for about 15 minutes each day to help with self-regulation and also to keep cool in this warm weather.

Hope also found a special surprise in her morning snack and had to share it - her peas in the pod had germinated! We talked about this and compared the peas in another pod she had, and explained what happens in nature when peas are not harvested (they are seeds so they germinate and make new plants when they fall to the ground naturally).

That's the news for this week! Next week we will read and draw pictures to go with summer words, will learn songs and poems for the last Sharing Assembly, and the Seniors will start rehearsing for their graduation on the 27th. They'll also start Memory books and the Juniors will make a summer pattern book.

Enjoy this beautiful weather and Happy Father's Day!