Hot off the presses...

Dear Parents, 

Here it is, your December Newsletter for Room 202!

Our show and share focus is traditions. Ania and Kai get to do show and share on Monday. Ijaz and Ella get to share on Tuesday. The rest will have to click this link or wait until your copy comes home, hopefully tomorrow.

December is a short month due to the Winter Break so not everyone will get a chance this month. But we hope to double up in future months!

 I am away Friday, but will leave copies for the supply to hand out.

Have a great weekend!

Lisa Goegan

Building, Comparing, Measuring.

Dear Parents,

I'm working feverishly to finish the final touches on the December newsletter, but we have confirmed dates for the Christmas concert: December 12th for the AM classes and December 13th for the PM classes. The morning concert should begin at 9:30 am and the afternoon concert will start around 2:30 pm.

I also feel like there's been so much going on in the past couple of weeks. I know I've spoken to many of you during parent teacher interviews, but as I look back on our structures theme, I'm amazed at some of the castles and other structures that have been built. It's easy to lose track of the broader picture in the day to day.

So here are some images. First, many of you have asked about our pumpkin. It's quite disgusting: all moldy and falling in on itself. The decorative gourds, on the other hand, have dried out and rattle when shaken. They're also much lighter than they were. This has led to much weighing and questioning about why certain things rot and other things dry.

 Because we were starting a structures unit, I was very excited when I saw that a tree around the corner was being trimmed. I enlisted the help of several students and made several trips to bring some of the wood over to the kindergarten yard for us to build with. However, mostly, the long thin strips got used as "marshmallow sticks" and the more irregular pieces were co-opted for small imaginary campfires. Eventually, we moved the wood out of the yard because we were worried that eventually someone might make a not so imaginary fire after dark. But we did have some good exploratory play. In the photo below, you can see the boundaries we've marked with the woodpile and some triangular forms in the back, using the fence as a wall.

 We've also been looking at the way movement works using this ramp. It's a complicated process, because there's several stages. The object has to be small enough to fit in the ramp, but big enough to ring the bells at the bottom. It has to move fast enough to keep going, but not so fast it flies out of the ramp itself. Below are several steps of this investigation:

First, we tried rolling objects from the house centre. 

Next we tried using different balls or beads.

Finally, we decided to make our own balls out of play doh and see what happened.

We've been measuring in other ways too. We have a growth chart: 

Tallest to smallest

Baby George is very short

And we've been putting the balance scale to work as well:

The balance scale works like a teeter totter. Two students practice with washers and scales.

Students investigate how to balance the scale.

Finally, we've used fliers to consolidate our understanding of how a balance scale works.

Next steps will be looking more at length and different units of measure. 

In literacy, we've been focusing on Robert Munsch stories. Many of my students really enjoy his books because they are often funny. We've also been learning about the kinds of characters and situations his books are likely to involve--often children are the main characters and they make a mess of things that needs to be fixed. Favourites here include: Purple, Green and Yellow; Mud Puddle; Thomas's Snowsuit and David's Father. Opinions on A Promise Is A Promise are more mixed: Lily likes it because it's scary, but other students prefer his more humorous books. 

  

Sorry for the extra long post!

Our calendar should be home before weeks' end. Tomorrow is library. Happy first snow!

Love, 

Ms. Goegan

Little Monsters!

I thought this had posted last week, but apparently not. Library this week will be on Thursday. And, in breaking news, we're just finalizing the dates and times for the holiday concerts. They'll definitely be on the December newsletter, but I should be able to post them by the end of the week.

Next, I thought I'd show you some highlights from our most recent art made from Rorschach-blots. We folded the paper and smushed the paint around to create the base for these, then applied beads, feathers, string, marker, paper, and google-y eyes to add the finishing touches. Some of them have such personality!

This one took me a while to get because it's a side view. The monster is flying and there's a sad person running away in the bottom.

James' monster looks like an elephant to me.

This student was very carefully placing beads along the line of symmetry and was very excited about the different shapes of the beads: stars, hearts, circles.

Izaiah was excited about the symmetry involved. His painting is of a LADY monster and a SEAL monster. They are dating, apparently. 

Hunter's monster reminds me of a chicken

The application of beads creates a pattern along the bottom of the page

Our Classroom Community

Before I forget to remind you, tomorrow is Library!

At the beginning of the year, my newsletter introduced you to Ms. Fenton (the gym teacher), Ms. Greenwood (the music teacher) and Mr. Hodan (the librarian) and in past posts here, you may also have caught glimpses of me and Ms. Fish.

We also have a weekly volunteer in the classroom named Jeff, who is a parent at the school. He plays guitar and leads some songs for the students. I rode home today singing the Tomato song (mostly) under my breath, so I'm sure that you've heard snippets of this one too. I will also admit to a having moment today listening to them all sing "You Are My Sunshine". It was very sweet.

In addition to that, we've started working with Reading Buddies. In the afternoon, we've partnered with Ms. Oseghale's Gr. 4 class. The morning was more challenging to arrange, due to scheduling, so a smaller number of students are coming in to visit us during their recess. What I love about Buddy programs like these is that students get that precious one on one time and both sides seem to love the interactions. The older students are very sweet and protective of their buddies and, well, you can see the engagement in learning.

Students read together in the cubby area

The quiet centre is transformed into the pillow centre.

I also wanted to touch on the reading program I sent home today. I know this is another thing to remember, but I've tried to keep it simple by making the switch every Monday. You received a poem that we'll practice reading in class and I encourage you to read it at home with your child as well. Each week, you should receive a different poem, based on the concepts we're looking at in class.

If you are an SK family, you also received a short book to practice and read aloud together. These books are very basic levelled texts, so you may notice a fair bit of repetition. This is good! Students learn through practice and will hopefully build some sight words as you gradually release the reading of the books over to them.  

Yours in learning, 

Ms. Goegan

All the little pumpkins

It may not surprise you to learn that I got very few good photos of the students in their actual Halloween costumes and that most of the ones I did get are blurry. Students were very excited yesterday! Please feel free to send me your photos, especially if you got some good shots during the parade. :)

In lieu of that, I thought I would post about some of the pre-Halloween learning that happened around our class pumpkins.

Here's an example of a daily message. Many of our daily messages reinforce curriculum, like this one does. Please also note the missing letters, which we have students fill in to build sound/letter recognition.

Here's a recent overview of our science centre contents.  You can see the charts of foods that grow, and the pumpkin's life cycle, with students' drawings added, as well as our uncarved pumpkin, celery food colouring experiment, and various leaves and stones brought in by students to examine.

Here's our chart, examining the difference between 5 and 11. Some students had a hard time figuring out which number was higher, so we modelled it by counting, graphing and drawing.

We tried to get students to create pumpkin faces out of blocks,  but most were more inspired by Picasso than we'd hoped. This group used one of our Halloween stories to help them create a face.

To model what students saw inside the pumpkin, we had them do some art. On the left is a particularly creative JK interpretation. On the right is a more restrained creation, with some writing. We provided pumpkin shapes, leaves, stems, string, pumpkin seeds, and pom-poms and let them go to town.

Gabby's seeds are not so much inside, but there are 24 of them, as she's written on the leaf (pom-poms were not included in the count).

Theo just really liked the big pom-poms.

Here students are beginning to explore whether pumpkins sink or float.

Some students continue the experiment while others go off to find new things to test and look through the magnifying glass some more. 

Here is the inevitable pumpkin soup. Note the creative use of the pine branch from the science centre as a whisk.

Unexpected learning happens through drama as well. The rubber figurines sunk, so the students decided to use the wooden block as a raft to save them. 

Ms. Fish gets students to help her draw the face on the pumpkin before cutting it.

Students stand in front of the graph that helped us choose which face we should carve.

So there you go. Today is Ms. Fish's final day in our classroom and her warm presence will be sorely missed. Many thanks are due to her for taking on pumpkin carving in particular.

In November, I hope to explore point of view in our stories, measurement in math and structures in science, but as these pictures show, a lot of learning happens outside any path I might try to tread.