June 17-21

 Hello Families,

It was our last full week of Kindergarten and we have been busy!

We started our week with a special treat- a professional lacrosse player from the Calgary Roughnecks team came to our school to teach us some really cool lacrosse tricks.  We learned how to scoop, spin and throw our lacrosse balls.  

Our word of the week was "Community".  We continued to learn all about how communities are places where "people live, work and play" together.  We were able to identify different places in McKenzie Towne along with different community helpers that may work in our community.  We read lots of stories about communities and community helpers this week.   We all worked together to build our own community using recycled materials and lots and lots of boxes.  We added our homes to the community as well as cars, buses and stop signs.  It was a lot of fun and a lot of work to put our community together- but when we all did it together it worked out beautifully.  You can ask your Kindergartener what they built to add to our town.  

This week we also spent lots of time preparing for our Kindergarten Celebration- practicing our songs and dances- as well as working on a phenomenal masterpiece of art to share. This week we also had the opportunity to go for a visit to Grade 1.  We met some of the Grade 1 teachers, toured the classroom and learned a little bit about what Grade 1 will be like next year.  

For our centre times we have been building, playing in our towne, exploring new math manipulative and shape blocks, playing house, building train tracks that stretch down the hallway, and going outside!

Lastly, the AM Kindergarten students came to school on Friday- which was "Summer Solstice".  We learned that Summer Solstice is the beginning of the summer time and it is the day that the sun is in the sky for the longest amount of time all year.  We talked about how Indigenous People in Alberta would loo to the land and nature for signs that the seasons were changing. We went outside for our own nature walk to look for signs of summer- and the amount of mosquitos were one of the signs (so if your child came home really itchy- I do apologize). 

The students have been very interested in the yellow dandelions and fluffy dandelions all over our school yard.  We learned about a dandelions life cycle and then collected a bunch to bring inside.  We worked together to transform our dandelions into natural paint hues and painted some summer solstice pictures with them.  There was lots of great questions, wonderings, predictions and exploration.  

Here are some pictures of our week: