Apples and Worms

Where do I start?!

Okay, honestly … where do I even begin? There has been SO much happening in our Kindergarten class these past few weeks that I’m not sure where to start! This blog post will be a mix of things as I go through my Ipad and remember all of our fun happenings!

By the way, times like this make me realize just how invaluable the Ipads are to documentation for assessment purposes. I keep saying, “Oh ya!” and “Oh, wow I forgot about …” as I scroll through the camera roll. As the year goes on, I’m hoping to become more tech-savvy when it comes to apps but for now … the camera is coming in handy!

Yet another inquiry …

APPLES AND WORMS!

During snack time, one of my little guys pulled out a MacIntosh apple that had a little brown spot on it. He held it up and said, “Does a worm live in here?!” I told him that a worm probably didn’t live in his apple (I didn’t want to scare him from ever eating apples again!), but questioned him about it!

Next week, we’re going to focus on apples a little bit more. Some of our centres will feature apple patterning, apple poems (en français), counting and sorting by colour and of course – eating! Our school is fortunate enough to have a fully functioning kitchen, so I’m hoping (with the support of administration, of course) to give the children a true-making-learning-hands-on-and-as-real-as-can-be-experience by baking some apple crisp! If I peel the apples and give the students some plastic knives to dice them, it might not be as impossible as it sounds. Plus, they’re going to LOVE eating it!

After the 'worm in the apple' conversation, I decided to purchase some very REAL looking worms and soil for our sensory bin. The kiddies had a blast putting soil in their pails and digging for worms. The custodian on the other hand … not so much. Heehee.

TWO BOYS PLAYING IN THE DIRT ... ALTHOUGH I DON'T LIKE TO LIMIT CETNRES, THIS ONE HAD A MAXIMUM OF THREE STUDENTS ALLOWED AT ONE TIME.

Here are some pictures of some other learning centres in our room: Literacy Centre and Calendar Centre.

 

LITERACY CENTRE - PRACTICING NAMES - AND NOT JUST THEIR OWN!

 

 

CALENDAR CENTRE

 

Let me explain 'the Calendar Centre' ... with the focus OFF of long circle-time, where students are sitting for extended periods of time doing calendar, we decided that having a centre for the weather bear would be a better choice for our students. After dressing “Mr. Ours” for the rain (umbrella and all), they spun a spinner to dress him up for other seasons too. At this centre, we rotate the weather bear and the calendar and have students manipulate the date and the days of the week.

That's all for now! Stay tuned to see how our 'apple inquiry' goes!

TTFN,

 

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Our first inquiries!

The new FDK program is child-centered, developmentally appropriate and play-based. In our classroom, we focus on ‘inquiry’ … which means, we plan for tomorrow based on what the students are interested in and what their needs are today. This week, we had two really great ‘inquiries’ …

If you’ve ever tried to teach while a fly, a spider or a bee were in your classroom, you’ll understand that students are WAAAAYYYY more interested in insects than anything you have to say. So, we went with it. We trapped two wasps this week, put them into little glass containers, took out some magnifying glasses and set up a ‘science discovery’ table.

We asked questions like, “What do you see with the magnifying glass that you didn’t see before?” … and “What will happen to the wasp if we leave him in the jar? … How do you know?”  In planning for next week, I’m going to ‘revisit’ the wasp inquiry … I’m going to read “Les abeilles"

                                               (Click here for the link to Scholastic)

And we’re going to fill in our anchor chart (using as much French language as possible, sandwiching the two languages) using prior knowledge and our newly learned info from our inquiry and our read-aloud. I’m planning for this “mini-lesson” to take about 5 – 10 minutes … no longer than that. If students aren’t interested in it, we’ll cut it short.

 

I also have a cute ‘craftivity’ for students to complete, inspired by Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching Blog, which will look something like this:

I’ve cut out all the ‘pieces’ and students will be responsible for gluing the pieces together, including the stripes – this should turn out quite interesting! Heehee.

Our second inquiry began in the block area. My teaching partner read “If You Take a Mouse to School” by Laura Numeroff (Click here for a link to this story being read on youtube -  super cute link btw because it’s a child reading it). During centre time, a few of our students were building towers. When I inquired about their towers, one student said, “This is where the mouse lives like in our book.” Ding, ding, ding. Bells went off inside my head. I questioned further, and he went to go get the book. Sure enough, he was doing a fantastic job replicating what he had seen in the book. I asked him if it would help if he kept the book open and tried to ‘copy’ it to challenge himself. So he did.

 

Two of our kinders (one JK, one SK), looking at the book and trying to replicate it.

 

A few other students came by to see what the excitement was about. I encouraged some of the girls to ‘draw’ the mouse house. It seems that we have little architects and contractors in our class … drawing up plans, building according to the plan.

This is a picture that one of our JKs drew of the tower ... there's a little mouse in the picture too (how cute ... and yet, so detailed!)

Our next steps, as teachers … well, it’s time for us to get down and build towers!! Next week we’re going to build some towers, take pictures of our towers and challenge our little contractors to out-build the teacher. We can also use "wonder" questions in the block area to stretch their thinking and we can make connections to what's being done in the block area to other centres (i.e. write about it, draw it, create a playdough model, etc.. )

Have I said how much I love my job?

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Kids LOVE David!

I had a feeling the kids would love David. But I didn't know they would LOOOOVE David even in French. David is bad ... and he's always up to no good.



We read "David va à l'école" at the carpet, sandwiching the French words with English and inferring from the pictures what David was up to. The kids were glued to the story, hanging onto every page. After we read the story, I introduced our 'craftivity'... I prepared (brown) circles for the head and the ears, black circles for the eyes, a black mouth and white triangles for the teeth. I showed students a model and asked for a raise of hands of who would like to make their very own David ... no surprise, everyone raised their hand.


This is what they looked like:

This was my 'model' to show them what the final product looked like ...

 

And this is what you get when you don't direct them to do it the 'right' way ... heehee. So cute.

 

On the second day, we re-read David and talked about the bad things that David did at school (chewed gum, butted in line, painted on his friends, etc ...) and I modelled how to draw a picture of David at school, using think aloud strategies. For example, "Hmm, David is not being very good at school. We read that he was standing on the desk. If I wanted to draw a picture of David at school, I would want to draw him standing on top of a desk." Then I asked them if they were going to draw a picture of themselves at school, would they draw themselves standing on the desk? NOOOO, of course not! I asked them to raise their hands and share what kinds of things they were doing at school. Then I modelled some of their examples. I prepared a worksheet from Mille Merveilles (Click here for link) and asked students to join me at the writing centre to draw self-portraits of themselves at school.

 

 

 

The result: diagnostic assessments on who could print their name, who could recognize letters in their name, who could hold a pencil properly ... and some cute selfies!

 

I had the JKs do the drawing only, while the SKs were asked to trace their name (I wrote them in yellow marker), and cut and glue the letters in their name in the proper order (I wrote out the letters).

 

I have die-cut frames that I'm going to attach their 'selfies' to, and it's going to be a cute display for the open house/BBQ. Oh, and I'll put up the David crafitivities too ... I can't resist.

 

TTFN,

 

 

 

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First Week!

I survived!!!

We spent hours upon hours getting ready for the first day ... and then it was over in the blink of an eye.

We only had a few "criers" on the first day ... and a few "entourages" that accompanied their little ones to class. But after a few quick kisses, parents were on their way. After about an hour, everyone seemed to settle in and they got right down to business - PLAYING! Trains, blocks, trucks, playdough, dolls, painting, you name it ... the children were engaged. Yay, mission accomplished!

I cannot begin to describe how crazy the first week was. It was craaaazy. Although it was also fantastic. I am so blessed to be a part of such a wonderful school and I am so lucky to be doing what I love each and every day. I love my "job" ... except, if you're a teacher or if you're married to one, you know it's much more than just a "job" ... it's a way of life.

I promised updated pictures of my classroom, so here they are (much more polished than just a few weeks ago, might I add!):

After meeting our little ones, we decided to rearrange a few things ... but for the most part, this is what you would see if you walked into our classroom. Oh, except that it's much messier at the end of the day ... we're working on 'self-regulation' and the expectations of tidying up, but they haven't quite mastered it yet.


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