Hard to believe it is already one month into our school year. Everything is in full swing now so lets look back at some highlights of our first month of kindergarten and grade 1.
We started the month with a lot of getting to know each other games and worked on routines. Each year I am so thankful to have such helpful grade 1s that are willing to help me teach kinders all the small (but at the time VERY BIG) routines. This is a huge advantage to having students two years in a row.
Our theme this month was "I am special" and a highlight of that was presenting our "All About Me" bags. Students are exploring their interests in our room each day during centre time. Some favourites so far are the engineering centre (pictured below), the dollhouse centre, the reading centre, and the look closer centre.
We started the month with a lot of getting to know each other games and worked on routines. Each year I am so thankful to have such helpful grade 1s that are willing to help me teach kinders all the small (but at the time VERY BIG) routines. This is a huge advantage to having students two years in a row.
Our theme this month was "I am special" and a highlight of that was presenting our "All About Me" bags. Students are exploring their interests in our room each day during centre time. Some favourites so far are the engineering centre (pictured below), the dollhouse centre, the reading centre, and the look closer centre.
We've ventured outside almost everyday for outdoor ed. Students are exploring the forest and the dried up creek bed and everything it has to offer. Acorns, leaves, milkweed, caterpillars and butterflies were some of the highlights from this month. We also harvested some tomatoes from our garden.
In math our first unit was patterns. Grade 1s dove deeper into them each day and kinders got their first taste. We created our own patterns, extended our friends patterns and played some games of "what's missing in my pattern?"
In grade 1 we have our daily 3 started: read to self, read to someone, and word work. It took some time to learn routines but the kids worked hard and we are up to 5 minutes of stamina! They are exploring new books with me at Teacher Table and we even had our first spelling test. I've taken an approach of making tests about making mistakes and risk taking, even when you are unsure and I always give the kids a chance to fix their mistake when they finish. We are working hard to develop our growth mindsets. We did a role playing activity about different reactions to making a mistake or when something is hard. For example, trying to figure out how to spell a new word. Each student got to act out a different reaction from the chart below. It was really powerful to see how each student understood and connected with these feelings that we all have sometimes. This is a great chart to post somewhere in your house to remind you about how important choosing your wording with your child can be for the way they think.
I am looking forward to next month as it brings us to our apples and pumpkins unit. If you have any pumpkins at home that you would like to donate, we can always use more in the classroom.