March 1st Newsletter

Dear Parents,

We enjoyed a wonderful week with Ms. McDonald, our new student teacher. She spent the week observing and getting to know your children and becoming familiar with our routines. Ms. McDonald will be spending Wednesday mornings with us until her six week practicum begins. This enables us to add one more morning offsite either at the seashore or the forest.
Our conversations with personal safety have continued and on Thursday I introduced the Buddy System from the program our school is using Kids In The Know. This concept shares that children 4-6 years old need direct supervision, needs to be visible to parent/caregiver at all times and that if another child is supervising they need to be 12 or older. We talked about different situations; playing in the park and using a public bathroom. We have also continued with our talks about body safety by knowing the names of our body parts as well as talking about what are safe/unsafe secrets.
I have begun to do a math assessment looking at subitizing, making number groups and reading tallies. This will be uploaded to your child's e-portfolio as they are completed.
I have continued to scribe your child's stories from story workshop and we have been adding them to our wall stories. As our collection grows I will begin to send them home, in the meantime I thought it would be nice to share them with families through Freshgrade. I have had trouble accessing the program recently but hopefully it will be up and running soon and the uploads will begin to appear.

More recently, I noticed that many of the children were interested in rainbows. They were making rainbows with loose parts, drawing rainbows and loved it when our crystal created rainbows on the classroom ceiling and floors. Our colour jars created with Ms. Minty show beautiful rainbows as well. This led to a mini project with the children. Throughout the project we completed three science experiments, two art pieces and worked on a collaborative art project using milk caps to create a rainbow on a canvas frame which is now finished and ready to be hung in our space.

The children have continued with exploration of clay with wire, beads and clay stamps. This transient art activity is very beautiful and will help the children when they begin to make their 3D pieces.
This week many of the children have chosen to create driftwood art using our  new wood crayons, wire, beads and mini pieces of driftwood. We hung them in the hallways to dry and invite others to enjoy the art and they will go home in a few days.

The Deer family adopted a baby fox. by Violet
In social studies the children have completed the Family Inquiry. Throughout the inquiry the children were engaged in many structured talks about similarities and differences in families, including how they spend their time together, favourite foods, movies, books. We talked about different kinds of families; divorced, single parent and same gender parents. We talked about foster care, adoption and birth parents. We read and re-read many beautiful stories about families which contributed to our conversations and watched Sesame street videos about family. The children completed surveys, shared families stories and created family drawings to accompany our family photo wall. Their knowledge and understandings appear in their writing, drawings, conversations and especially story play.
As 100 day approaches I have sent home a family project. The lego structures will be displayed for about a week. I will label the structures as they arrive. On Wednesday we will do some fun activities around the number 100.