We started off our day with morning exploration time. We have been busy playing in our castle structure that we made as part of our inquiry. Dogs, princesses, princes, queens, kings, people, enemies, cats and mice have all been guests in the castle. After snack and outdoor play, we had a special journal time. We listened to a story and wrote in our journals about our most imaginative party ever. We practiced labeling with our own spelling and practiced making spaces between words with our space monsters! We then talked about our new inquiry project: The upgrade of George Jay School. We have brainstormed many questions we have about the upgrade and there are lots of interesting points to be discovered. We then worked with a partner to design George Jay School if we were in charge of the upgrade. What would we add? What would we changed? Why is the school special? Each partnership was given a different set of materials to build and design with. After lunch and outdoor play, we came in for Paul et Suzanne, some oral French and quiet literacy choice time. We then went to the Multi-Cutural Celebration in the gym. We took part in 6 different stations: Aboriginal Drumming, Japanese Paper Art, European 16th Century Dancing, Aboiriginal Bannock and art, also a special Archery activity. This was a great afternoon!
I apologize for not updating for the past couple weeks. We have been so very busy with our Castle Inquiry project and setting up our Student Led conferences that unfortunately our blog has taken the back burner. But here we are again!
Lundi: We had a wonderful assembly from a brass group from the Victoria Symphony called: Heavy Metal. We learned all about the different brass musical instruments, how they are made, the different sounds they make, the different relations between the instruments; it was great. We went outside for gym with our other kindergarten friends. In the afternoon, we had a very special activity. We had the opportunity to 'facetime' (similar to Skype) with another kindergarten class at View Royal elementary School. We sang them a song and the presented us a song, we had time for questions about their school and daily routines and then did a comparison between their school and ours. This was a great oral language activity and a great time for questioning practice (not stories!). It was in English, because we learned that the children learn in English at View Royal, but we did two songs in French for them. We are very excited about this new friendship! Mardi: We did a lot of preparations in the morning for our Special Castle exhibit for Student Led conferences. We had journal time in the morning and did an Earth Day Art project using recycled CDs. We used the CDs to create planet earth mosaics, they are displayed in our classroom. After lunch, we walked to the spirit garden and looked for 5 flowers. We did an oral language French activity talking about the flowers, and then came back and used this for another journal activity. We then visited the music class, where we had a special Aboriginal presentation about storytelling and drumming. The visitor was dressed up and was very interesting, he will be joining us and leading this workshop for the next three weeks in music class. How exciting! Mercredi et jeudi: We used the mornings to prepare and build castles as part of our student led conferences. On Wednesday we had gym with Mme Sunny and on Thursday we had computers with Mme Sunny. On Thursday morning, we worked in our journals using our new 'SPACE MONSTERS'. They are popsicle sticks with a googly eye on top that eats spaces between words (just as a finger is used to make spaces when learning to write). We then created scenes for our space monster in our journals and wrote about them using our own spelling and sounding out letter sounds to the best of our abilities. This was very exciting. We had an early lunch both days and went home early for Student led conferences. Wrapping up our Castle Inquiry: Our castle exhibit during Student Led conferences wraps up and displays all our work from our Castle Inquiry Project. When you come to tour the room, you will notice the four exhibit tables. Each table has a variety of projects (art, clay projects, writing work, ipads with movies and clips, created books) along with a bound book of the groups research and planning work. These projects are produced by the children in that expert group. Your child took part in one expert group that focused on learning about a specific topic. They will tour you around all four expert groups, because they are excited to share their peers' learning. Around the room are built castle exhibits, a big cardboard castle, royal portraits, our shields, castle shape art and light table building. We hope you enjoy learning about castles and sharing in our discoveries. Yesterday, we had a super busy day. We did egg dying in the morning. We did some castle research before gym with Mme Sunny. After lunch, we had literacy choice time and then spent the afternoon creating crests and shields. We found a guide in a national geographic magazine, 'how to make your own shield'. We were so excited about it, that we felt we should get started right away, and we did. The shields will be on display at a later time.
This morning, we started our day with morning exploration. All of us had the chance to finish our Royal Portraits, they are up in the hallway now. They are wonderful! After snack and outdoor play, we had journaling time with Mrs. McPhee, we always enjoy having her come and visit our class. We worked on creating a scene using small toys as characters and then labeling our images. We then had tech time with Mme Sunny. We came back for calendar and some singing. After lunch, we had some more research time about castles. We then walked to the forest for an exploration time. We were surprised with an Easter egg hunt. We had to find the two parts to the egg. The top parts had our first initial in an uppercase letter, and the bottoms had our first initial in a lowercase letter. We had to find the matching egg for our letter. Once you'd found both parts to your egg the children were given a chocolate egg. This a great afternoon spent with all of our Kindergarten friends from the other classes, in the forest. |
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