Week of April 22-26

Dear families,

I hope you are having a great start to your weekend!

This week we focused on learning how to take care of the Earth, and started our inquiry on Insects. The words of the week were PRETTY and HOW. A big Thank You to our parent volunteers this week: Reina's mom and Estella and Simonne's mom helped with today's Pizza Lunch; and our Mystery Reader was Anilee's aunt. The children's 2- and 3-D Shapes Folder went home in today's mailbag. The kids will love showing you what they learned about the shapes around us!

For our Inquiry on Taking Care of Our Earth, the children looked at the numbers in the triangles on plastic containers. They learned that they need to rinse out plastic containers (for example their yogurt containers) before putting them in the recycling bin. They also painted a picture of the Earth and took their wonderful recycled materials projects home. They were so good! Thank you for helping your children with this important lesson. They are enjoying playing in our Reused Gingerbread House which we are using as a cottage now. They also learned where Water comes from, learned a song called R-A-I-N-Y to match our wet weather this week, and learned some water words. We talked about and wrote about how to take care of the Earth, for example going to Farmer's Markets and using reusable bags to shop (we looked at a bag that was made from plastic bottles!), using LED lights, saying "No, thank you" to plastic straws" and using metal or paper straws instead, only using one paper serviette, and more! They are good eco-warriors!

To start off our inquiry on Insects, the children told me what they knew already. Then they learned about parts of an insect, and learned that spiders are not insects! We have lots of fiction and non-fiction books in our classroom library, and our Science Centre is now an insect exploring centre, with life-size and huge models of various insects. We will be learning where insects live, what they look like, how they move, why some of them bite us, and what they eat (as well as what eats them!). The first insect we learned about was everybody's favourite - the Dragonfly! We learned lots of fun dragonfly facts and made a dragonfly out of paper and reused plastic.

We had an impromptu inquiry on immigration, thanks to the wonderful book one of the children took our of the library. We learned that we are all immigrants and we learned the difference between MOVING to a new place in the same country, and IMMIGRATING to a new country. Some of the children shared their stories of immigration. I sent home an email earlier today asking for feedback about which languages the children's ancestors spoke at home. This is for our Sharing Assembly on June 21. Please respond to my email by May 1st so we can start practicing for the assembly. Thank you!

The children are also learning about Signs of Spring and made a poem on a pop-out egg about Spring. Their work is on display in our hallway.

The children did a great job at our surprise fire drill!

Next week we welcome a new student named Ethan. Welcome to LKS, Ethan and family! We look forward to meeting you!

The Kindergarten classes will be going on an all-day field trip to REPTILIA on May 15, leaving LKS at 9 a.m. and leaving Reptilia at 2 p.m.. We will need 3 volunteers for each class. Once the permission form is sent home (next week), please indicate whether you would like to volunteer. Preference will be given to parents who have not had an opportunity to volunteer before. Thank you!

That's the news from our classroom this week! I hope you have a wonderful weekend!