February 20-23

 Hello Families,

I hope that you had a fabulous Family Day weekend together.  It was wonderful to be back together this week as we started to notice that the sun is coming up earlier and earlier and we are coming to school in the sunlight again! Hooray!

Our word of the week was "Integrity", which is a BIG word in Kindergarten- but an important one. We know that integrity means "doing the right things, even when nobody sees".  We practice this when we follow the expectations in the Library, when we clean up after ourselves in the classroom, when we play with our classmates in the classroom and on the playground.  The Kindergartener students have been very proud of themselves for showing integrity as they follow the school rules doing "messenger jobs" like bringing down the attendance to the Office, or delivering materials to another classroom.  We have been noticing all of the ways we can show integrity- and how it makes us feel inside.

This week we were very excited as we took on the role of an Author! We are writing our very own Animal Fact books.  We have been learning how to gather information from non-fiction texts and practicing "research skills".  We all chose an animal that lives in Canada.  We are going to share factual information and discover what our animal does in the Winter time.  We will be working on these next week as well- and then we will be able to share them with our classmates and Buddies.  Then we will bring them home to share as well.  Make sure to ask your child which animal they chose.

The PM class was eager to use clay with their Big Buddy to create a sculpture of the animal they chose to research.  The AM class will be able to do this next Friday.

This week our letter of the week was Hh.  We continued to practice labelling in our word books and using our understanding of letter sounds.  We also began learning about vowels, and noticing them in words.  We counted how many vowels are in our names, and began to build words that were 3 letters long with a vowel in the middle.

Thank you to the families who have sent along Family Pictures.  We will be sharing these the first week of March.  I am happy to print off photos if you send them along to my email : kerupert@cbe.ab.ca

During centre times we have spent time outdoors enjoying the sunshine, putting on puppet shows, building with different materials,  painting, writing stories and making cards, playing in the house centre, learning a new board game called "Counting Campers", doing puzzles and building different animal habitats.

Here are some photos from our week! I am also sharing a picture of our collaborative art that we made with our Big Buddies! It is titled "A Work of Heart".  The Kindergarteners thought it looked sooooo beautiful when the Big Buddies showed them the final product of all their hard work:)