April 5-9

 Hello Families,

Our classroom was full of energy, joy and excitement as the Kindergarten students reunited after their Spring Break, eager to share their stories and get back into playing and learning with their friends.  Our word of the week was "Encouragement".  After brainstorming this word, one student was able to describe it perfectly - they said "It is when you do and say things to help give confidence to someone else".  We all agreed that was exactly what encouragement is.  We realized how often we encourage each other, and how great it makes other people feel when we share encouragement with them.  I love overhearing the students talking to each other through the day saying things like "it's ok if it's hard, I can help you" and "I like your drawing" and "Don't stop playing the game with me ok? Maybe you'll win next time!"  We also spent time continuing to encourage our Pumpkin "Lil Greeny" to keep growing! Lil Greeny is ENORMOUS now!

Our letter of the week was "E" this week- which can be a tricky letter to write (especially lowercase e's).  We know that Ee makes 2 sounds, and is a vowel and we can tell you when we hear it in the middle of 3 letter words- like bed, and pet.  We have continued to practice identifying medial sounds in words and substituting beginning sounds in words during our phonics times.  We also played a very fun game where we traced letters on a partner's back.  They had to guess the right letter.  We could give them clues to help them guess by making the sound(s) that the letter makes! 

We read stories about "Eggs" and "Elephants" and even "Elephants Egg-Sitting".  We read a silly story called "But No Elephants!" We journaled about what we would pick for a perfect pet, and which pet we would say "No way" to.   We also began to talk about the changing of the seasons as the beginning of the week was showing us signs of Spring- before it snowed and snowed and snowed!  As always, we took the opportunity to go outside and embrace the crazy weather- making giant snowballs, rolling down hills, watching the birds and making tracks in the snow.

During centre times we emptied our rice bin and set up the Sandbox again with gold coins and dinosaur bones.  We also had our classroom Grocery Store open. The students have been busy thinking of new things to add to our store- like labels, money, credit cards, price tags and signs.  Everyday we seem to add something new to our "Super Superstore".

Our PM class had Big Buddy time on Friday and participated in Mrs. Rupert's STEM Building Challenge- working through different building and problem-solving tasks with lots of materials and their Big Buddies to help.  They built mazes, marble runs, domino runs, bridges, and structures.  We always love seeing our Big Buddies.  

Next week we will begin our measurement unit and will have lots of opportunities to measure different things in the school and classroom in lots of different ways.  

Here are some pictures from our week: