November 14th Newsletter

Dear Parents,
I always begin to think about Christmas about mid November and begin with a thorough cleaning of my home. The same goes for the classroom. This week as Miss Minty assumes the role of teaching 100% with myself moving to support teacher, I will be cleaning and refreshing the classroom, updating our art corner and working more closely in small groups. I have removed the home centre to leave more space for block and road building.
The literacy assessment is completed and your child's e-portfolio has been updated. This past week I began to work with the children on showing them how to video themselves and upload the video to their portfolio. We began with asking the children to count to ten and back down to zero and will move to making number groupings to five followed by patterns. It is so satisfying to offer this opportunity to your child to reflect on his/her learning and share it with you through the e-portfolio. 

Miss Minty's unit on Mindfulness has really connected with the children and our Colour Monsters (angry, worried, calm, happy), and different parts of the brain. It is wonderful to see a child revisit the jar and move a stick to happy during the day. She is teaching through a combination of activities, stories, songs and art, including our beautiful collaborative wreath.
The children have almost completed their collaborative chandelier. We ran out of materials but fortunately, they have now arrived and the chandelier is ready for the finial details. We have submitted a request to the school district for permission to hang in our classroom cubby space.
Miss Minty has introduced her math unit on patterns and will continue with mini lessons, guided activities and partner learning. The learning goals are for the children to understand and apply math language; core, copy, repeat and pattern. We also want them to recognize a pattern in different formats; clothing, nature, stories, dance, movement.... They will be creating an anchor chart in the classroom, working with loose parts to copy, extend and build patterns as well as creating pattern work samples to bring home. Our November/December math program will continue to include math exploration, math challenges and math journalling.

I was able to add to our Story Play resources this week thanks to a Professional Learning Grant. I will be working with a co-hort of nine teachers guiding them through our very successful Story Play learning framework. It is exciting for me to share the joy and creativity I am enjoying with your children with this professional learning co-hort and to know that so many children will experience the opportunity to grow their oral language while building relationships with their peers.
We expect, weather permitting, to be offsite for the remainder of November and early December Monday, Tuesday and Thursdays. I will continue with our weekend announcements confirming our offsite locations. 
You may have noticed that the green poetry/song folders did not go home on Thursday. The reason is that almost all of them were not returned on Monday and some are still at home. Our vision was that the children would share their poem/songs with you on the weekend and bring it back to school on Monday so that they can continue to practice the songs/poems during daily reading. I would like to try again this coming week. I recommend that the the green folder go directly into the communication folder after your child shares it with you.
I hope that you have a great weekend. Thank you,
Mrs. Hilland, Miss Minty and Mrs. McCaw