October Review

Sorry for the delay!  The month of October was full of opportunities for learning with and from each other.  Check out some highlights of our learning below. 

Belonging and Contributing:  Identity day brought us the perfect opportunity to demonstrate a sense of identity and positive self-image.  Students had the opportunity to bring in a picture or artifact that reflected who they are, or something they enjoy.  The students talked proudly about what they had brought in and respectfully listened to their peers in order to learn more about the people they spend their days with. The students also really seemed to enjoy sharing their artifacts with the adults who came to visit us, thank you to everyone who attended! 

Self-Regulation and Well-Being: We continued our study of emotions and started using the Zones of Regulation to help us manage our emotions. The students have been learning how to identify their own emotions and move their name magnet into the various zones based on how they are feeling (into the green zone when all is good, into the blue zone when they are sad or tired, into the yellow zone if they are irritated or there is a little problem and into the red zone when they are quite upset).  We are still learning other emotions that may put us into these zones, and students are beginning to be able to identify strategies that will help move them from one zone to another (optimally, back to green!).  They also began learning about big and little problems and are beginning to talk about the size of the problem when they are upset. 

This month also brought us the opportunity to learn about safety!  We had a couple fire drills and a bus evacuation drill and we had many discussions about how to handle situations like this if they ever happened for real.  We learned that it is important to stay calm and in control of our bodies (walking, listening, looking to trusted adults for instructions or asking for help), in order to keep ourselves safe. 

Literacy and Mathematics Behaviours: Oral communication is a big part of our leaning in Kindergarten.  This month we learned new vocabulary such as French colour words, fall vocabulary, Halloween vocabulary, and different ways to ask for help, among other vocabulary, that can help us communicate in French.  On a daily basis we talk about the letters we see and the sounds that they make. We practise manipulating them in different ways such as blending them together and pulling them apparat. 

In math we continued to work with the numbers one to ten.  We played math games such as dice games, measured our height using foam pumpkins and compared them to the height of our friends, and used a pumpkin and various materials to explore measurement of both height and girth.  Using things such as cubes and strings to measure the pumpkin, allowed us to build our fine motor skills as well by connecting and breaking apart cubes, or when cutting the string. Our teachers feel that incorporating fine motor activities into our learning is an important part of our development as it prepares us for things like writing!  We use our journals almost every day to draw pictures, or to write words, messages or stories.  The teachers regularly ask us to share our pictures with them and to explain what we have made and why in order for us to practise talking about our thinking. 

Problem Solving and Innovating: The children’s natural curiosity came into play a lot this month.  Whether we were exploring the natural world on a nature walk, or investigating gourds in our classroom, the students showed that they were capable learners by questioning, observing and communicating about what they saw.  While exploring leaves, students talked about what they saw, what they smelled and what their fingers felt, in order to create a deep understanding of the similarities and differences between the leaves.  They used the same skills to compare gourds in our classroom.  They asked questions such as “Are those bumps seeds?” and investigated to find out if their predictions were accurate or not.  A leaf snap app on the iPad and pebblego.com are two tools we became familiar with this month. We used them to answer some of our questions such as “What kind of leaf is this?” “What tree did it come from?” and “Is seaweed a plant?”  As teachers we are proud that our students are beginning to ask questions that we can investigate together.  If your child asks a question at home that may be of interest to others, we encourage you to pass it along so that we can learn the answers together. 

It was a great month of learning together and we look forward to what we will learn next!