Friday June 23

Hello Parents

Here are a few reminders about our last week of school.

Monday-
This is a regular day...

Tuesday-
The schedule for Tuesday will remain same however children have been invited to wear pajamas as we will be having pajama day and movie time. We plan to send home indoor shoes that day so please ensure that your child is dressed with appropriate footwear for Wednesday Sports Day.

Wednesday-
AM students will be participating in a school wide Sports Day event. Hot Dogs will be offered at 10:30.

PM students are welcome to come in the morning instead of the afternoon. This was to accommodate children and parents who wanted Sports Day with their siblings.

PM students who attend from 12:02-2:55 will also have a "mini Sports Day" with their Kindergarten classmates. Hot dogs will be offered at 12:15.

We are looking forward to a great last week of school.  We have enjoyed our year with you and your children!

Mrs. Kenna
Ms. Cvach

Friday June 9

Dear parents,

June is flying by so fast! We have been so excited watching our caterpillars transform. They are now full and ready to be released. Our plan (weather permitting) is to let the caterpillars go free on Monday June 12. We will ask the students to think about "advice" they would give to the butterflies as they begin their adventure into the wild.

Here are some quotes from the week...

I liked seeing the butterflies hatch- Vincent

This week I enjoyed sewing my penguin stuffy. Aemelia

I saw the red colour coming out of the butterfly chrysalis - Lauren

I liked paying centers -Humza

If you would like to add a comment, please reply by using the comment section below. 

The AM class had their spring walk to the pond today. We used our 4 senses (taste was not involved) to look for evidence of spring and then we created a chart together. We will walk with the PM class next Friday.

A FEW REMINDERS:

There will be no home reading, library or homework books for the remainder of the year. Please return all outstanding bags and books.


SPORTS DAY
Sports Day will be in the morning of our last day of school (Wed. June 28) There will be stations set up for the afternoon class as well. The parent council has generously offered to organize this event this year. If you would like to volunteer, please contact the office.


Enjoy your weekend!

Friday June 2

Dear Parents

This is our last month of Kindergarten! Boy time really does fly by. We are so proud of how far the students have come this year and we will miss them as we end for summer.

Thanks to all the parents who came to our Literacy Night this week. Over the summer, please try to keep literacy work in mind as you notice street signs, books and letters in our world.

Butterfield acres was a tremendous success. Thanks to all of our volunteers! We can not do field trips like those without you!

Here are a few pics... Enjoy your weekend.

Kindergarten

May 26, 2017

Hello Parents

This week we have been very busy as we prepare for our field trip next week. We have discussed all of the different animals (domestic vs wild, farm and pets.) Our animal rescue center continues to be a fun place to explore animals needs and take care of injured stuffies.

Our butterflies are now here! Children have been observing our caterpillars and the caterpillars have been VERY hungry. It is amazing how fast these insects grow! We expect big changes coming next week as our "young butterflies" (AKA caterpillars) have woven some silk and are looking too big for the skin they are in... The caterpillars are even pooping!! A LOT!

Math

We continue to work on number pairs to 10, as we call them "friendly numbers". You can support your child with fluency in this area by playing the hiding game with small objects or fingers. Simply hold up 4 fingers for example and ask "How many are hiding". Your child will want to count the fingers individually at first but then recognize 5 and 1 make 6 that are turned down.

Enjoy the sunshine!
Love Kindergarten

Friday May 12, 2017

Hello Everyone,

Thank you to everyone who contributed to our new wild animal rescue center.  We are learning about the difference between wild and domestic animals as we prepare for our trip to the farm.  AM Kindergarten will be going to Butterfield Acres for the full day on May 29 and PM will be going on May 30.

This week in Math we have been reviewing 2D shapes and connecting them to their 3D relatives. The children have also been learning about number pairs to ten, such as 3 and 7 or 6 and 4. We have been using the term "friendly numbers" to describe these pairs and have been using our ten fingers to help us figure them out.

In Language Arts this week we focused on the letter Ss, and how the sound of the letter changes when we put the letter Hh beside it.  We also wrote in our journals.  Students are being encouraged to draw a picture, then using the alphabet strip as a tool to "write" a sentence using initial consonants.

Now that the weather is warming up, gym will often be taught outside.  Please ensure that your child is wearing appropriate outdoor footwear.  It is difficult to play kickball or soccer when wearing sandals or flip flops!

The Volunteer Tea is May 18th at 9:30. If you have been in to volunteer, please consider coming so we can appreciate you! Our AM class will be performing  a few songs at the tea :) RSVP the office if you can come.

Love Kindergarten

Friday May 5 2017

Hello everyone,

Phew ! This was a very busy week - full of excitement!

Monday we had Music Monday and the children in both the am and pm classes sang with our "School of Rock" teacher musicians led by Ms. McBride.

May 3 was "Hats on for mental health day"- We talked in class about all the ways we keep healthy and revisited our learning about the Zones of Regulation. We watched the first 6 minutes of a video that taught us about our upstairs brain (thinking parts) and the downstairs brain (emotional parts) and how we can use our thinking brain to solve problems. It was create by Ms. Low, a grade 1/2 teacher at our school. 
To learn more check it out: 

https://youtu.be/3bKuoH8CkFc

Arbor day
We are so excited about our new plants in the school and the larch tree that was planted in the front. Various donators contributed to our Arbour Day celebrations and thousands of dollars helped to make Cranston school a greener and more beautiful place to learn. 

Thursday books
NO homework this weekend. Enjoy your weekend everyone!

Field trip to Butterfield Acres May 29/30

Our dates for the field trip are as follows:
May 29:  full dayAM  (no school for PM)
may 30:  full day PM  (no school AM)

If you are able to volunteer we would love to have you! Check to see if you have your security clearance covered please. We require more parents for the afternoon in particular. Sign up using our link to the left. Thanks so much!

As we move closer to the end of the year, the students have been very engaged with learning centers that are moving towards grade one concepts. We are excited to be using our literacy and math skills in games, cooperative activities and individual tasks during this time.

That is all or now,

Love Kindergarten

Friday April 28, 2017

Hello everyone

A few housekeeping items:

Thursday May 4 is our Arbor Day celebration from 6-7:30. You are invited to come tour our classroom and school to see what we have been up to lately :) You will not need to stay for the hour and a half as it is an "open house" format so come when it suits your schedule.

Field trip: We have our Butterfield Acres field trip at the end of May and are requesting volunteers. Please sign up on the blog schedule if you are able to join us. 

Our school has been hatching trout! They are almost ready to be released and you are invited:

This week news:

Ms. Manneck was back this week to finish up our penguins. We created a King Penguin and a Rockhopper Penguin out of paper mache. In making these, we had to pay attention to detail and know what the physical characteristics a penguin are and how each of these penguins is unique.

We also began some new learning centers this week. These centers mostly focused on reading and math concepts to prepare us for grade one. We did some rhyming, letter sound matching, math skills, printing and drawing.

We are continuing with nursery rhymes to help us read common words such as come, down, fall, the, it etc.. We are having a lot of fun acting and re-enacting the stories.

Love,
Kindergarten

A few pics from the week:

Friday April 21 2017

Good afternoon everyone,

Our bean observations have been going very well. Hopefully your plant has found some dirt and you are able to watch it grow.

In our day count we are now up to 128! Wow! That is a lot of days in school.

For homework this weekend, we are wondering if you can reply to our blog question...

In the 128 days you have been here, what have you enjoyed the most? What are you the most proud of? Write your idea in the comments section and we will share on Monday together.

FIELD TRIP SAVE THE DATE:

We are going to Butterfield Acres on May 29th for AM class and May 30th for PM class.
These field trips are full days therefore on May 29- no school for PM class and on May 30- no school for AM class. We are looking for volunteers on these dates. If you are able to join us, please email us and enter your name on the blog schedule. This farm has many animals that children are allowed to pet so the more volunteers we have the better. Thank you :)

MAY 4- ARBOR DAY

May 4th is our Arbor Day celebration. In Kindergarten we have been learning about how things grow. We are growing marigolds, peas, beans, and dill. We have also grown taller and smarter ourselves. Kindergarten students have also grown in their independence as they are doing more things for themselves. It is exciting to see how all the children have made new friends and new accomplishments.

Please come on the evening of May the 4th to see some of our learning about trees, ourselves, plants and art.

Our Dance was excellent! Well done everyone! It was great to watch your dance with AJ.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Mrs. Kenna and Ms. Cvach

Thursday, April 13

Hello Parents!

HOME READING:
This week we began home reading. It is so fun to try to figure out new words! Please remember that it is not necessary to rush through the levels as even A/B books have some great vocabulary to learn from. If you would like a harder level though, simply send your teacher a note or an email and we are happy to reassign if appropriate :)

BEANS!!
Our beans have sprouted and are growing very quickly. We are looking at them carefully and sketching changes with our scientist mind. Watching carefully allows us to notice even the smallest details.

PLANTS!
In our room we have plants growing and today we noticed they were bending towards the light! When we turned the plants around... they were bending again! They must really love the sunlight.

SAYING GOODBYE
We said goodbye to our chicks and Ms. Manneck this week. They will be missed very much! Ms. Manneck promises to visit and we are able to check in on our chicks with the farm owners to see how they are doing. It was a great learning experience.

NURSERY RHYMES
Nursery rhymes are helping us to read because we say the stories all together and notice how the letters and words fit together. Last week Humpty Dumpty fell (poor thing!) and this week we learned the story of Little Boy Blue. (He's a bit of a sleepy head!)

NUMBERS
We continue to explore numbers to 10 in a variety of ways and look at REALLY BIG numbers like 124 with our day count.

DANCE PERFORMANCE
Lastly, we have been dancing with this cool instructor named AJ in our gym class. We have a hip hop dance to share next Wednesday, April 19th. Parents are welcome to attend our performance. The AM class performs at 8:15 and the PM class will perform at 1:50.

CLASS PHOTO DAY- APRIL 19TH!

NO SCHOOL FRIDAY APRIL 14th or MONDAY APRIL 17th

beans in our bags

Humpty Dumpty can try!

bean observations

buddy readers

the letter L- literacy

Friday, April 7, 2017

Hello Parents of Blue and Yellow team!

We have made some adjustments to our blog and now the information will only pertain to our 2 classes. As our classes have travelled in some unique learning directions, our blog will reflect the learning happening in Ms. Cvach and Mrs. Kenna's classes.

Please click on the link to the left if you would like to volunteer for any dates.


News this week...

Our chicks arrived from Ms. Manneck's farm on Monday. All week we were patiently waiting and then finally on Thursday they began to hatch. Here is a video link to chicks hatching in an incubator that is very similar to ours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLH91zzsXQ

Math games!

Our chicks! First day!

life at the farm

engineers at work

We will continue to have the chicks in our classroom until next Wednesday. 

In class, we have focused on the letter N and discovered many words that begin with N. In our journals we drew nests with eggs. 

We are now at the 120th day of school! Wow, time flies!! In Kindergarten we are growing in many ways and we have planted seeds. The class will be watching the sprouting and recording observations. 

Monday March 13 - Friday March 17

Dear Mom and Dad,

This week at school we continued to learn about penguins and the blue/yellow team went to the zoo for the penguin program.  We had some visits from some sneaky leprechauns in our classrooms this week, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day.  Get us to tell you about the fun things we did. 

Team Wonder:

We had a fun-filled week continuing our work with patterns, penguins, and snow.  We started our week with a winter walk being detectives, looking for patterns and animal tracks in the environment.  We saw a lot of patterns and followed deer tracks on our walk; we even found deer hair.  We brought some artifacts back to our classroom so we can continue to take a closer look with our magnifying glasses at our wonder wall.  Get me to tell you about some of the things we saw on our walk. 

We have been learning a lot about penguins in our classroom and we learned even more when we went to the zoo for the penguin program.   We learned about the four different penguins that are at the Calgary Zoo; they are the Gentoo penguins, King penguins, Humboldt penguins, and the Rockhopper penguins.  We learned about what penguins eat, what some of their predators are and some of the adaptations they have for life in the cold.  We also were lucky enough to see the King penguins walk we really enjoyed seeing them waddle past us.  Some of us also had a chance to see Grace feeding baby Edward, she regurgitated the fish she had just eaten for him, it was pretty cool.  

We had a surprise delivery this week in our classroom, it came all the way from Antarctica.  We were accepted into the "Antarctica Penguin Patrol" program and received our very own King penguin to take care of in our classroom.  We are busy giving him everything he needs to be happy and healthy everyday.  Ask me what our penguin needs in order to survive.  Also, we still need a name for our penguin, see if you can come up with a name fit for a King :)

Yellow and Blue Team

We started off the week by learning the letter “Mm”. We sang the “M” song, walked around like monkeys, sounded out the letter, and even made the letter M with partners. Check out the pictures below. Guess if we made capital M’s or lower case. We have continued to work closely with patterns in math.

 Throughout the week we read many St. Patrick’s day books and learned about leprechauns. Ms. Cvach has been followed by a leprechaun for many years. He follows her to every school she teaches at. We began to worry that the leprechaun may visit our classroom this week. So as a class we decided to catch that sneaky leprechaun. We designed two traps to catch the leprechaun in hopes that he will lead us to his pot of gold. On Friday morning much to are surprise the leprechaun had been in our classroom. And he made a HUGE mess, knocking over chairs, hiding shoes, and leaving footprints everywhere. He set off our traps, but was no where to be found. Looks like the leprechaun was way to cleaver for our traps.

We all dressed in green and brought a really cool green snacks. We were really excited that the leprechaun left some gold chocolate coins to enjoy. Check out our traps below. 

On Thursday we had a beautiful sunny day at the Zoo full of excitement and incredible animal sightings. We focused on the animal’s enclosures and needs. It was really interesting to learning about what each animal needs to stay alive and happy. 

Love,

Kindergarten

Housekeeping:

Don't forget to sign up for student led conferences. 

Next week is a short week. Please look to the left hand column of the blog for important dates. 

Monday March 6 - Friday March 10

Student Led Conferences:

On Wednesday March 22 and Thursday March 23, we will be having Student Led Conferences. Please note that this will look very different than our first meeting.

 Student Led Conferences will be led by your child so please bring them with you. There will be different stations that you and your child will visit and their job is to share their learning with you. These stations will give you an idea of the expectations of the curriculum in kindergarten and where your child is at. 

Signing up for a time:

The time that you sign up for by clicking HERE will be the time that you and your child will meet with your teachers. This means that you can come 15 minutes before or stay 15 minutes after your conference booked time for your child to share their learning. 

**During your booked time with your child's teachers, there will be other students sharing their work with their families. If you would like a more private setting to discuss your child's learning, please contact your child's teacher directly and we can make arrangements. 

We look forward to seeing you at conferences! 

Dear Mom and Dad: 

In math we have been learning about patterns. We learned how to create, continue, and label a “AB” pattern. We have also challenged ourselves to create an “ABC” and an “ABB” pattern.  I can make a pattern with colors, blocks, objects, actions, and sounds. Ask me how to make an AB pattern.

Team Yellow and Blue:

Our classes are creating life size paper mache penguins. We have decided to make two different types of penguins. We are making one Emperor and one Gentoo penguin. The Emperor penguin is the tallest and heaviest of the species reaching 122cm in height and weighing 22kg- 45kg. The Gentoo is a smaller penguin species that is known for its long tail. Our first step was to sculpt the frame of the penguin with wire. We practiced as a class to create individual pipe cleaner penguins. Then during centers, we created a life size structures. Check out our wire structures in the pictures below. Stay tuned! They are a work in progress.

This week we also talked about animals and their needs. We had Shelly visit our classroom during centers. We created enclosures for Shelly and talked about her needs. Ask me, “Who is Shelly?”

Housekeeping:

Blue and Yellow PM: Zoo field trip is rescheduled for Thursday March 16^th

Blue and Yellow AM: NO SCHOOL Thursday March 16^th

Team Wonder:

We continue to talk about how we can fill each other's buckets. I am working hard in the day to make sure that I am not dipping but filling someone's bucket, including my own. Ask me to tell you about our new zoo center! It is so much fun as we thought about what we will need to run a zoo. At our maker space, we have students making signs and enclosures for our animals. We even have veterinarians on site to help with the animals. We looked at animal footprints. At our wonder station, we can explore and imprint different animal prints. It is so cool! 

We have been working on our literacy skills through alphabet bingo. I should be able to tell you the letters in my name and be able to find these letters in the environment. I should also be able to tell you the different sounds that the letters make. If I am having difficulty with this, please help me practice this at home. You can ask me to find a certain letter in a word. Some of us are even putting letters together to make words. 

In Roots of Empathy this week, we learned about safety. It is important for me to know how to read the pictures on specific products. I know that different symbols on cleaning products mean different things. I also learned that babies cannot read these labels yet and it is best to keep these items away from them. 

Housekeeping:

On Monday March 13, Team Wonder will be going on a winter walk. Please dress your child appropriately for the weather. 

Love,

Kindergarten 

Monday February 27 - Friday March 3

Dear Mom and Dad:

On Monday February 27 we celebrated our 100^th day at school.  We did a lot of fun activities; ask me to tell you about some of them. For our 100^th day of school we had a lot of fun dressing up as if we were 100 years old, our teachers even dressed up.  We counted our one hundred things from home using our ten frames.  Ask me how to count by tens.    We had a challenge to build a structure using 100 cups, see the pictures below for some of our creations. We used our 100 things from home to help us count to 100 using 10 ten frames and then counted by tens to 100.  We used a program to age a picture of ourselves and had a lot of fun seeing what everyone might look like when they are 100 years old.  We also tried to think about where we might be when we’re 100 or what we might be doing.  Get me to tell you what I came up with.

AM students went to the zoo!  Not all classes have gone to the zoo yet so we don’t want to give anything away.  Ask me to tell you 2 new facts I learned about penguins and ask me to tell you what my favourite animal is. 

Team Wonder:

We started our 100^th day by talking about items we would want 100 of and things we would not like to have 100 of, ask me to share some of our ideas.  

We have continued to learn about penguin adaptations for life in the cold and this week we did a penguin experiment to see how the special oil on penguins’ feathers helps to keep them dry.  We colored our penguins with wax crayon, to mimic the characteristics of the oil, and then had a chance to spray our penguins with water to see what happened.  Get me to tell you how our penguin “rain jackets” worked. 

Blue/Yellow Team:

This week we continued to practice our number sense by counting to 5 using shake and spill.  We spilled 5 double-sided counters out of a cup and had to make a number sentence using our five frames.  Ask me how many different ways I can make 5. 

Have a great weekend and see you on Monday!

Love,
Kindergarten

Housekeeping:

ZOO FIELD TRIP:

Team Wonder AM

Thursday Feb 23 - NO SCHOOL for Team Wonder AM class only

Tuesday February 28 - Team Wonder AM Zoo all day

Team Wonder PM

Thursday Feb 23 - Team Wonder PM Zoo all day

Tuesday February 28 - NO SCHOOL for Team Wonder PM class only

Blue/Yellow AM

Wednesday March 1 - Blue/Yellow AM Team Zoo all day

Wednesday March 8- NO SCHOOL for Blue/Yellow AM team Only

Blue/Yellow PM

Wednesday March 1 - NO SCHOOL for Blue/Yellow PM team Only

Wednesday March 8 - Blue/Yellow PM Team Zoo all day