Dear Parents, 

I wanted to give you an early post to give you a sense of the new year's classroom dynamic. One of the first questions I always get is how we manage students in the classroom and the main answer I give is that the space is organized to accommodate them. Here's a photo I took today showing about half our students in situ: From left, 4 are playing in our house centre, 2 are playing at the sand table, 6 are having snacks and 4 are playing at our water table. 

We also have our play dough centre open, where students are beginning to use their imagination and experiences, some in expected ways, others a bit further afield. 

Many snakes

An old fashioned lock

This is a manta ray.

The manta ray interests me in particular, because this student was looking at a map book where a manta ray was pictured. Some of our other students have also been fascinated at looking at the different types of whales, so this may be an avenue for the class to explore. This is how curriculum goes in kindergarten: we build off of student interests and fascinations to learn about the world. 

For my part, I'm trying to foster an interest in plants and seeds in order to get us started on the life cycle of plants. We've started off the year by looking at seeds. Yesterday we took apart some tomatoes and tomatillos. Today, we talked in the morning about what seeds are: many students were unclear about what seeds were for, but we eventually got to a group understanding that seeds go in the ground and become the plants that they come from. Our conversation got more students interested in looking at the seeds and today, we took apart a pepper, pomegranate and an apple. 

Tweezers are also an excellent fine motor tool

 Today, we also had our first investigation of the year. Students started linking chain links together and got very excited about how long it was getting, so we did some measuring to see just how long it really was. 

First, we stetched out the chain as long as it could go.

Then we checked how many kindergarteners long the chain was.

On one side, there were ten students and on the other there were eight (one side definitely had more SKs).  These sorts of investigations are rich learning opportunities because they get students involved in the problem solving process.

So there's a brief introduction to 202. I look forward to keeping you updated through the blog this year because I feel like it's a great way to give you insights into classroom learning. Hope you're having a great first week.

Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan