We are pretty much becoming superstars in our daily routines these days. ...So much so that Mme Van Sickle threw a new routine at the Grade 1s this week - Wall Math! (Mur de maths). When the Kindergarten students arrive in the morning and begin to play, it's chop-chop! for the Grade 1s...get those brain juices flowing! It's a great chance for us to practice our basic numeracy skills on almost a daily basis. We are even able to get a lot of one-on-one teacher attention since we are a small group, so Mme is able to challenge us individually with more difficult concepts when we're ready. And as soon as we complete our work, we get to join the Ks for a few minutes of play so we are getting better at coming in and getting straight to work! We had some fun in Science this week as we continue to learn about our colours in French. We put primary colours in just three mason jars and then linked them all with paper towels. As a class, we made a hypothesis that the colours would mix together and we came back to school the next day to find that we were right! The colours had crawled from one jar to another, creating secondary colours! We recorded our observations and the Grade 1s wrote about the results, as well. Having the jars on the table has given us a great visual all week for when we sing our arc-en-ciel song. We had a very special treat this week, as well, with an elder from the Katzie reserve coming to visit our class. Mme Van Sickle helped to make a class set of First Nations drums last year so the community wanted to come visit our class to teach some Katzie drumming and dancing lessons. We learned that the drums are made from real white-tailed dear and that we need to respect the animals by respecting the drums. Some of the Katzie children who attend our school, along with one from PMSS, came to help out with the lessons. We had so much fun drumming along and the Katzie kids and the elder told us that we had the best energy of any of the groups they've done this with. We were more than happy to get up and dance when they invited us to do so! We even got to drum along to a special First Nations "Happy Birthday" song for Vesper who had a birthday recently.
Week 1 of full days for the Kindergarten students and we are rocking it! There are no more tears (not even from Mme Van Sickle), and we are all starting to settle into routines. Even the Grade 1s have stopped saying, “But that’s not the way my old teacher did it!” Our lives are basically one long, extended musical (with actions!) these days as we learn our basic phrases through song. Wanna go to the bathroom?...sing it. Wanna drink water?...sing it. Need a pencil?...sing it. So if we come home singing about toilets and asking you for help to the tune of “Down by the Bay”, now you will understand why. By Friday, many of us were starting to be able to use these basic classroom phrases spontaneously, independent of the melodies. We are learning so much vocabulary and our brains are like sponges! In Math, we are continuing to look at patterns. We are noticing patterns all around us and experimented with building various types of patterns out of blocks and colouring patterns on paper. In French, we are going full steam ahead on learning our letter sounds. Our favourite part about learning sounds is digging into Mme Van Sickle’s “Boîte de mystères” (mystery box) to find objects that start with the letter of the day. We have also been working this week on creating self-portraits. We nearly lost our marbles when Mme Van Sickle told us that we were allowed to use SHARPIES for this project!! She had to assure some of us that our parents wouldn’t be mad about us using them because the teacher had given us permission…as long as we were careful! ;-) We got to explore the medium of oil pastels, as well. Some of us managed to create very good likenesses of ourselves. For our outdoor explorations this week, we went to the school garden. We had so much fun digging in the dirt and mud, climbing trees, discovering “des petites bêtes” (roly poly bugs), walking around on stilts, sitting on "la balançoire" (the swing), and much more… We’ve also enjoyed exploring more of the centre toys in our classroom. The puppets were a big hit this week and we even had an impromptu student-led puppet show. And finally, we spent our afternoon on Friday getting to know students from the other Kindergarten and K/1 combination classes in a massive outdoor play time that we will do every Friday afternoon throughout the year.
Well, bonjour! Thanks for stopping by! This is the space where you get to check out all of the cool stuff that's happening in our class. We've spent a lot of time this week connecting with one another. Mme Van Sickle had the Grade 1 buddies introduce their Kindergarten buddies (in French), say how old they are, and what their favourite colour is. After each introduction, the students threw a ball of yarn to the next person. By the end, we had a great spiderweb effect and we talked about how we are all connected in this class and are here to support each other. ...and then we stood up and had fun passing through the "laser beam" tunnel. The unofficial theme in our class this week has been "kindness". What can we do to be kind to others? What does that look like? We read a couple of books about kindness, including one called "How full is your bucket?" in which we imagined everyone having invisible buckets over their heads. The buckets fill up when people do nice things for us (or when WE do nice things for OTHERS), and the buckets empty when we are feeling sad. We decided that we all want to be "bucket FILLERS". We each coloured a bucket in a pattern (mathematical concept this week) and then tried to think of something that we could do to be kind to others to fill their buckets. We talked about how sometimes, being kind means sharing something that you really love. Mme Van Sickle LOVES the m&m cookies from Superstore. So as a class, we helped her share some of these cookies with our Grade 6/7 big buddy class. And we delivered the cookies wearing capes and masks because when we are kind, we are superheroes! We wear our masks because being kind is not about receiving recognition for what we are doing. Afterwards, the students said that their buckets were so full from the experience "that they reached up to GOD!"...and "my bucket is filled up all the way to my Grandma's house!"...and "my bucket is filled up all the way to Paris!" We all agreed that it felt really good to make other people happy! Our Grade 1s had their introduction to journal-writing this week, as well. Our hand muscles have been on a 2-month summer vacation so some of us really had to push through on this exercise, but we all completed it! And we talked about how in just a couple of months, we will look back at this exercise and think that it's SOOOO easy! Just like dance, soccer, hockey, and playing an instrument, we have to practice writing and reading to get better at it. In Science, we talked about germs and how they can spread quickly from one thing to another. We put glitter on a cup to represent germs and then a volunteer grabbed the cup. The glitter got all over his hands, and then he shook hands with another student. We picked up some pencils and scissors and saw the glitter transfer to those, as well, and then we went around high-fiving each other. It was a good visual of why it's so important to wash our hands. We've all been having a great time exploring all of the toys, crafts, and nooks and crannies in the classroom this week!
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