Drinking Fountains

Some of you may have read the article in the Toronto Star about the questionable cleanliness of drinking fountains. Our fountain gets cleaned at the end of the day, but I'm going to take on cleaning it more often. I'll disinfect it midway through the morning, then again at lunch, then again midway through the afternoon. Please remind your children not to put their mouths on the metal, but to "catch" the water with their mouths. I'll remind them too!

I will also have a pitcher of cold water for the children to use throughout the day. I'll have it out on a tray for the children to use -- there will be clean cups for them to use, but feel free to send in a (plastic please, and labeled))cup each day in their snack bag. A small reusable water bottle is fine also (please label it! I have a hard time remembering bottle owners!). A bit of masking tape and a sharpie marker do a great job of labeling.

Beautiful Stuff

We'll be doing lots of art exploration in our newly expanded "art studio" this year. We'll be collecting small "stuff" to create with. If you are ready to toss anything, consider putting it aside for us.

• toilet paper rolls
• clear salad/lettuce containers (boxes) [for storing our stuff]
  
• used greeting cards (just the front are fine, but feel free to give the whole card)
• old calendars (I'll remind you again in December/January)
• broken calculators (we've pulled a few apart this year and used the buttons in our art)
• wrapping paper (used) (small bits are fine)
  
• tissue paper (again, small bits are fine -- I cut it up)
  
• broken jewelry
• buttons, beads
• shells, small pieces of driftwood
• yarn, fabric scraps (small is fine)
  
• wallpaper
• wood scraps
  
• small twigs, acorns
• wire
  

This year I'm hoping to have lots of parent volunteers helping with the class. Some duties are administrative, some are directly working with the students. Some things will be able to be done at home, and then sent back the next day. Starting in October, I will need a parent to help for 5 or 10 minutes at entry time (am and pm). Please consider giving 5 minutes of your day to help us run our "borrow a book" program!

A wonderful year!

We have had a wonderful year in kindergarten :) . Thank you to all of the parents for lending me your most precious children!

Throughout the next week I am going to post some of the pictures and work that we finished throughout June. June was a whirlwind for me (us!) and I had so little time for the blog. The good news is that this spring I took a course in Kindergarten curriculum and learned so much! (It was every Tuesday night and 4 full Saturdays, hence the lack of time!). I am going to try hard to post on the blog weekly next year.

Change is good!
The Ontario Government has expanded the 2006 Kindergarten curriculum -- it is very similar to the old one -- you can have a look at the draft version here. (yes, it is the Full Day Learning document). The Toronto District School Board is leaning toward an inquiry based program (that's a good thing :) . I have been working with the Early Years Department to really embrace this in our classroom. I will spend much of the summer reading and planning for our class! Feel free to email me and ask any questions -- or voice any concerns (you can leave a comment here on the blog if you'd like) (or find my email under my "profile").

If you would like to read more about emergent curriculum and inquiry based learning and teaching -- Google "Reggio Emilia". The Reggio Emilia philosophy is based upon the following set of principles:

• Children must have some control over the direction of their learning;
• Children must be able to learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, seeing, and hearing;
• Children have a relationship with other children and with material items in the world that children must be allowed to explore and
• Children must have endless ways and opportunities to express themselves.

(this sounds pretty much perfect to me)

We go back to school on September 7 (teachers are in the week before). All of the SKs moving to Grade 1 will go back to school on September 7, as will the JKs moving to SK. See you then! Have a safe and happy summer!

Math Monday -- Data Management and Probability

In Kindergarten children sort, classify and compare objects and describe the attributes used. They collects objects or data and make representations of their observations, using concrete graphs. They answer and ask questions about their data and the graphs, and use mathematical language in their discussions.

Graphing activities for kindergarten include collecting data and organizing it in a variety of ways.

When children walk around the classroom and ask their friends which cereal they prefer, put a tally mark under the cereal picture, and count how many tally marks are in each column, they are not only graphing but also working with statistics or data analysis. There are lots of fun things to do in this area of math and the activities integrate well with science activities.

Graphs make counting and comparing meaningful and provide opportunities to bring numbers, letters, letter sounds and other literacy skills to the children's attention.

When children are making guesses about what might happen in different situations, they are learning about probability.

The children should have experiences:

• collecting information
• counting and making tallies
• surveying peers
• sorting objects
• making graphs with real things and making picture graphs
• reading graphs
• making observations from a graph
• working with tally marks and comparing their results with a friend's results
• asking questions about graph results
• using the terms "never, sometimes, always"

This graph is one of our "entry" activities. Each child has a name card and they pick it up upon entry and answer the question. This question was from shortly after we visited the farm and each child had an opportunity to touch a chick. As you can see, not all of the children opted to touch the chick! We talked about how many people had says yes, they had touched a chick and how many people had not touched a chick. Then I asked the hard question: How many more people touched the chick than didn't touch the chick? (4 more). This is a tricky one, but we have done it lots of times, so most Sk students and some Jk students understand it.

Butterfly Garden

We painted butterfly gardens. The instruction that I gave the children was to paint a garden the our butterflies would be happy in. Didn't the classes do a fabulous job? (I also told the students that they needed to fill the paper with colour -- I did hear a lot of "Ms Brown, am I done yet?" My answer to this usually is "What do you think?" -- They really do know if they have followed the instructions or not). The children asked if they could glue on some more flowers, so we dug into the collage materials and now we have some beautifully overgrown gardens. Perfect for butterflies. (these paintings are large -- about 18"x24")(We did make some butterflies, but they're not quite finished.....)

(you can click on any of the above pictures to see them a bit larger)

We made some caterpillars too! (they were encouraged to look at our caterpillars but they didn't have to stick with the colours that they saw in real life). They added some other bits and pieces too. I have two very creative classes!

Caterpillars, chrysalis and butterflies, oh my!

We've been looking at the life cycles to butterflies in the classroom -- and due to the recent heat wave, there have been some fast changes!
First we started with caterpillars. They were all delivered in a box like this:

(looks ominous, doesn't it?)

Then the adventure began:
Inside was a jar of many, many tiny caterpillars, some rubber gloves, some food, 30 little cups with lids, a beaker and instructions.

Ms. Wren and I had to mix the food (kind of like hard Pablum) and then pack a teaspoon full into the bottom of each little cup. Then the cups had to have holes punched in the top (3 holes). Then came the fun part. You had to scoop up each little caterpillar with a paint brush (really) and place one into each cup. Without letting the other feisty caterpillars escape. The caterpillars (less than 1 cm long at this point) clung to the paintbrushes and had to be coaxed off (well, really, shook off). Fun was had by all, and I am very happy that we didn't do these preparations in front of the students because that would have ensured mass mayhem. Once we had filled the 30 cups, we still had about another 30 caterpillars! the instructions say to double them up (this hasn't worked well in the past) or to put them in the freezer (to kill them). I came up with the bright idea of putting them in jars ( the caterpillars had a difficult time with the jars -- maybe too slippery? -- so I had to put in popsicle sticks for them to climb up to the lids)


They grew so quickly! In a day or two they looked like this:

When fully grown they were about 3 cm long (1 1/4 inches). Then they climbed around their cups for a few days and then climbed to the top and went into chrysalis -- and hung from the lids of the cups. I took the lids off of the cups and taped them to cardboard which was placed across the top of an aquarium (with some netting on top).
A few days later (each stage is supposed to be at least a week, but I think that the heat sped it up a bit), the butterflies began to emerge from their chrysalis. They are beautiful! They are called Painted Lady Butterflies. We have sugar water in a lid for them to drink, but we released the ones who had emerged into the front garden today. We still have a few more caterpillars and a few more chrysalis to watch next week.

Here is what the empty chrysalis looks like:

Cool isn't it?

Arts Night

As most of you know, Arts Night was last Thursday (the night before the farm trip -- we didn't plan it this way -- we booked the farm in January!)


At Arts Night the Kindergarten Students performed 2 songs -- This Land is Your Land and Feelin' Groovy. We were so lucky to have a parent come in and help us with the singing. Sheila Philcox is a mom of one of the students in the morning class -- and she came in weekly to teach the morning kindergarten classes some music and movement. THANK YOU SO MUCH SHEILA!!! I taught my afternoon myself -- it was a bit harder because we had to learn the songs unaccompanied by piano ( Ms. Brown doesn't play the piano). But we all pulled it together and did a Great Job!!!!


We also had art to display. We displayed our houses that we made from boxes -- and we displayed some new art. We made faux batik on fabric! It took 3 days to complete our pieces. The first day learned all about lines and practiced making some lines with markers. Then we "drew" lines with special glue onto fabric squares. After these dried overnight, we painted the fabric squares with watery paint. These had to dry overnight again. The next day we had to soak and scrub our squares to get all of the slimy glue off. Then we had to let them dry again. It was a lot of waiting! But the result was worth it. These batiks can be frame or mounted onto canvas to hang on the wall. they can also be stitched into a wall hanging -- or to make a cushion cover. They are now up on our classroom wall, but will come home in June.