Full Day Early Learning Kindergarten: Weekly Photos of Learning in the Classroom

*Photos of Learning will be posted on a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis. Please check weekly to see what your child has been learning at school and talk about the photos that you see with your child.*

Week 1
Classroom Photos

Hello Everyone!

This week, we dedicated a lot of time reviewing the classroom rules (see photo below) and going over important procedures and routines that will allow our classroom run smoothly for the entire year!

Here are some of the things that we went over:

1. Putting our things away neatly on our hooks as quickly as possible when we enter the classroom.
2. Signing our name on the Sign In sheet when we enter.
3. Getting a book to look at quietly after we have done the above two jobs and reading quietly during morning announcements.
4. Walking in a straight line.
5. Playing safely on the playground.
6. Staying with our partner when we walk outside.
7. Sharing classroom materials with one another.
8. Cleaning up our centres when we are done visiting them.
9. Telling the teacher when we need to use the washroom.
10. Treating each other with kindness!

We also read lots of stories together, learned new songs, did our first piece of writing, and began our monthly calendar on www.starfall.com!

Here are some photos of the centres that your child visited this week.

Here are our five classroom rules:

1. Make smart choices!
2. Raise your hand to speak.
3. Listen when someone is talking.
4. Respect yourself, others and the school.
5. Make your teacher happy! (By following the rules!)

Our students enjoyed completing these fun alphabet puzzles.

Some of our students enjoyed putting these numbers in the right order!

Many of our students enjoyed sharing and creating amazing structures at the Building Centre!

Many of our students visited the Home Centre and pretended to run a bakery!

Some students visited our Reading Centre and tried to re-read the book "Pete the Cat" which we read during Circle Time.

Here is one of our Morning Messages that we used to start our day off every school day.

I was happy to see that many of our friends already knew how to write their first names! We will be working on this skill next week at another centre.

Our students enjoyed reviewing upper and lower case letters by visiting the centre seen here!

I also set up a Drawing Centre for students to visit.

Please stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton

Week 2 - September 8th-12th, 2014

Welcome to Week 2!

We continued to work on routines and classroom rules, walking in a straight line, what to do in case of fire drill and showing respect to one another.

We learned our first group of Popcorn Words (see below), worked on recognizing numbers, and hosted some sing-a-longs in our classroom with Ms. Ballantine's class!

We read "Chicka Chicka 123" to review our numbers.

We are working on a number tree as a follow-up activity to this book.

We painted paper plates and paper bags (which will serve as our number tree) and let them dry.

Next week, we will twist the bags, glue them onto our paper plates and stick numbers on them to make a genuine Number Tree!

Here is our book of the week, "Lazy Duck". We used this book to review the basic concepts of print (front of the book, title, author's/illustrator's name, finding text, letters, words, etc.) and also used it to review our Popcorn Words of the Week ("a", "do" and "the").

We are practicing writing our first and last names!

We are learning how numbers look in fun new ways!

We used these bags to practise writing letters, numbers and making shapes!

We are learning three high frequency words this week ("a", "do", and "the"). We call these types of words "Popcorn Words" as they "pop" up often in most books that we read. We played this fun "fill-in-the-blanks" game on Monday and explored centres related to them!

In the activity seen above (last photo), we discussed the difference between letters and words (i.e. that most words are made up of different letters but some words are only made up of one letter). Then, the students had to draw a line to connect each row of popcorn to the Popcorn Word that it belonged to (e.g., the row of three popcorn kernels matched the word "the" as this word has three letters).

We also worked on our first names with this fun fine-motor art activity!!!

As you can see, some of the names are not completed yet. I will post the other names in next week's batch of photos!