Dixon, Mercer, Sticksl Kindergarten Blog: Weekly Update September 17

This Week:

This week is Safety Week. We will be practicing how to stay safe in our school, get out of our school safely in an emergency and talking about tricky people.

Have you booked a conference? Please make sure that you access your CBE PowerSchool account to book a time to meet with your child's teacher this Thursday or Friday. Evening time slots fill up quickly so it is best to sign up as soon as possible to get your preferred time.

Monday, Sept. 17 - PM students will practice a Fire Drill

Tuesday, Sept. 18 -

Wednesday, Sept. 19 -
AM students will practice a school evacuation. We will do our best to be back in time for our dismissal but please be patient if our little legs take us a few extra minutes to get to our dismissal door.
Please return all blue conference questionnaire forms by today.

Thursday, Sept. 20 -
No school for Kindergarten children. Conferences will run in 15 minute sessions from 9:00-3:00 PM and from 4:30-8:30 PM.
There is a Beakerhead Assembly today at 1:20pm. Kindergarten children may attend WITH a parent/guardian.

Friday, Sept. 21 -
No school for all children. Conferences will run from 8:00am-12:00pm.

Circle of Courage - Independence
Well the cold weather has arrived much earlier than we would like. This means that you should send your child to school each day prepared. Please ensure that you label every piece of clothing that your child brings. We do our best to make sure everything has left the classroom at the end of the day but items such as hoodies, mittens and hats frequently go missing into the abyss. A challenge to the cold weather is all of our winter gear. Children in kindergarten are expected to be independent in dressing themselves for the weather. As a parent you can help your child by providing them with a warm jacket with a working zipper and plenty of time and opportunities to practice this lifeskill. Teachers will provide time, verbal and visual prompts to assist students with dressing themselves before leaving the classroom.

This is the order that we encourage children to get dressed in. Once snow pants enter the mix they will be first.

Last Week:

In this section, we will recap learning targets that we covered last week. We try to capture our learning through photos. Our learning usually involves hands-on activities where children have worked with manipulatives and have talked about their learning.

You can help your child at home by reviewing the pictures with them and asking them to tell you what they see independently. A great follow up question to student learning statements is "How do you know?" We encourage you to use this question when children provide you with both a plausible and different response as it helps them to verbalize their learning and provides you insight into their line of thinking.

We talked about the word "attributes" and learned about sorting items into groups by the attribute of colour.

"I made piles of colours."

"I put all the colours in a line."

"I sorted these by colour. I put four in each group."

"I put these green ones in a line. These blue ones are with other blue ones and I did the same with the red ones. I made the yellow ones fancy by putting them together in a circle."

We learned about "Mat Man" this week. We sang the song, and practiced creating shapes with whiteboard markers on whiteboards and in our journals with pencils. We started to explore being an artist by adding details to our drawings with pencil (hair, clothing) and then used realistic colours to enhance our drawings.

PLAY

Play continues to be an integral part of how we learn in kindergarten. We explore, create, read, write and socialize through various centres.

Our dollhouse is a physics experiment. Cylinders roll off of the rooftop and crash into the other blocks.

Our house centre is serving up the bears from the sorting centre. Children sorted the bears into similar coloured bowls then cooked them and served them up to their friends.