Week of October 29 - November 2

Dear families,

I hope you are having a nice weekend in spite of this rainy November weather! Unfortunately I am home with bronchitis and laryngitis - a lot of the children have been sick the past few weeks, too. I hope everyone will be feeling better very soon!

This is what we did this week in our classroom:

Literacy: The letter sound of the week is Ee as in "egg" and "elephant." The words of the week were BE and A. We traced and found Halloween words, read Halloween poems and sang Halloween songs. The SKs circled the words they knew in the songs and poems. The JKs coloured, cut and glued matching Halloween words to pictures, and traced Halloween words. The SKs read sentences and drew accompanying pictures (for example: "I see three pumpkins.") All the children completed a colouring page in which they had to colour in the parts of a puzzle that had the word "orange" in it.

Numeracy: We count everything in Kindergarten! This week we counted pumpkins, and did sequencing activities (the growth of a pumpkin, how to carve a pumpkin, e.g.). The SKs completed a "before and after" numeracy activity, writing the number that comes before and after numbers from 1-30. For example, ____ 16 ____. The JKs did a number recognition, drawing and counting activity about ghosts. They traced numbers 1-7, drew the corresponding number of ghosts, and then counted them. With our Reading Buddies, the children turned 2-D orange strips of paper into a 3-D pumpkin. We also did a class prediction about how many seeds were in our little pumpkin. I roasted them at home and the kids tasted them ("It tastes like popcorn!") and then counted them by groups of ten. A great way to assist your child with numeracy skills is to play board games and sorting games.

In Science, we are learning about pumpkins and the signs of fall. We'll learn a lot more about this next week.

In Art, the children made mini pumpkins and ghosts with play-doh. Small motor skills really develop in the kindergarten years, from pencil grip to colouring to using scissors and picking up small objects to sort. We did a lot of colouring this week. the children's skills are improving!

Thank you so much to Everleigh's dad who was our Mystery Reader this week! A huge THANK YOU to the parent volunteers who made crafts with the children at our Halloween Party: the moms of Ella, Evelyn, Reina, Shay and Sophie supplied and made wonderful hands-on Halloween crafts with the children. They had a fantastic time! The Halloween Parade was so much fun, too!

Congratulations to Diesel and Casey who received this month's TDSB Character Trait Award for demonstrating Responsibility. Good job!

Next week we will be doing Remembrance Day activities as well as learning about Signs of Fall.

Thank you so much for your donations to the LKS "Scare Hunger" food drive for the Daily Bread Food Bank. Your generosity and thoughtfulness are truly appreciated.

I hope you have a great weekend!