Wish for your Child & Important Updates

 

Thank you to all the families who met with our kindergarten class online for Virtual Meet the Teacher Night! Thank you for your patience and cooperation with the technology issues we faced last night. The presentation will be shared with parents through email next week. Please email me if you have any questions or concerns. Please check your child's backpack for the Wish for A child paper - wishes can be written and returned for Monday. 

Our Learning

This week we are continuing our work on following routines, whole body listening,  interacting with friends, while staying safe and having fun. We continued our work on letters and letter sounds using our A is For Apple Song and Lively Letters! The Lively Letter program was developed by speech language pathologists and it uses pictures and stories to help teach letter sounds. The stories are based on how the sound is produced in the mouth and letters are generally paired based on sound production. In the last few weeks we have zoomed in on the letters /P/, /M/, and /S/.

This week we started our "Friend of the Day". Everyday one student will be selected by draw (if someone is absent their card goes back in the pile so no one misses out). Our Friend of the Day will get to come to the front, write their name, share their favourite colour, activity and food, as well as their age. They will be the line leader and will help with small tasks around the classroom. 

Friend of the Day is a great opportunity to begin work with letters/letter sounds and numbers. For example Mia starts with /M/ can we think of some other words that begin with the letter M? Elizabeth is 5, how can we show the number 5? Students are encouraged to print their own names.

In math, we continued our work with 2D shapes. Students practiced drawing the shapes, and using lines to create pictures. Our focus this week was using horizontal and vertical lines to draw ladders. We will continue next week with tracing, constructing our own pictures using shapes and a shape surprise! 

Some of our learning will include learning from the land and Indigenous Peoples. Each student has an animal table group. 

Ask your child, "What animal table group do you belong to? How does this animal move? What questions do you have about these animals? What do you wonder?"

(We've started to learn about these animals movements, Blackfoot names and their importance to us here on Treaty 7 Land, in Calgary and area).  If you'd like to read through some of these animals with your child, click here for the Animoves Resource . 

As we learn about being Treaty Peoples. we've been practicing The Calgary Public Library's Treaty 7 Land Acknowledgement. 

Wednesday, September 30th is Orange Shirt Day. Please wear an orange shirt to school. In kindergarten we will continue to learn that everyone belongs in our classroom, school, community and beyond.  Every. Child. Matters. 

Reminders 

AM students Terry Fox Run Thursday 

   

Friday, October 2 NO School for AM Students

Friday, October 9 PD Day NO School for K-4 

Monday, October 12 Thanksgiving Monday NO School for K-4

Friday, October 16 AM Attends 

Friday, October 23 NO School for AM Students

Friday, October 30 PD Day NO School for K-4

Have a fantastic weekend!  See everyone's smiling faces (behind the masks) on Monday! If you have any questions or concerns please contact me at sifieldstone@cbe.ab.ca

Terry Fox Run

 

The Terry Fox Run is coming up on Friday October 2nd. As Friday is a PM Kindergarten day, our class will take part in the run on Thursday. Although it will look different, we want to honour Terry Fox and his legacy. This year is the 40th Anniversary of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope and is proud to be continuing the legacy of one of our greatest heroes. Please join us and support this wonderful cause by donating to: http://www.terryfox.ca/KennethDTaylorSchool Together we can make a difference! #terryfoxschoolruns @terryfoxfoundation 

All donations will be going through the above link. We are not asking students to bring in money this year and there will not be an assembly. Online donations will continue up until October 5th. We are hoping to raise $2,000 this year. If that goal is reached Mr. Faunt and Mr. Belcher will put a pie in their own faces (because they love to eat pie). Students will be able to watch this virtually through a link. Let’s see if we can make their dream to eat pie come true! 

Welcome to Kindergarten!

 Thank you families for all of your support with kindergarten startup. We have had a great first few weeks of school! Your children have been wonderful, and I am more than impressed with the way they are taking care of themselves and wearing their masks. Everyone has done a great job keeping their masks on and utilizing mask breaks. Each student brought home two masks on their first day of kindergarten. 

We have spent some time learning our new procedures and routines. Keeping a distance, sitting spots, whole body listening and lots of hand washing and sanitizing. We are working on lining up, making new friends, being calm, and in control of our bodies. They have all demonstrated just how amazing they are at learning how to be a kindergarten student while washing/sanitizing their hands and wearing a mask! 

We have enjoyed reading some books the past few weeks. Here are our favourites so far! 

We have been learning about lines and practicing different types of lines to develop our pre-printing and drawing skills: 

Additionally, we are learning about 2D shapes. We are developing our vocabulary such as round, sides, and corners. We are becoming masters at drawing shapes such as circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles. We used our knowledge of shapes to begin some guided drawings of crowns, bumble bees, and people. Please ask your child to share their drawings with you as I know they are VERY excited to show off their artwork! We also went on a shape hunt this week in our classroom to find  examples of circles, squares, triangles and rectangles all around us. Please ask your child if they can find examples of these shapes around their home.

Next week we will continue to practice how to draw our shapes, and discover what types of pictures we can create and draw using different shapes. We will continue learning about the alphabet letters and letter sounds through songs (such as A is for Apple), sound games, matching games and conversations. We will introduce different emotions, what they look like (focus on eyes and eyebrows as it is hard to see our mouths when we are wearing masks) what they feel like, and how to calm our mind and body when we are dysregulated. 

Friendly Reminders

• All students brought home demographic forms last week, please complete and return by Friday September 18th. 
• AM and PM Kindergarten classes alternate on Fridays. These are longer days and some students may need a second snack!
• Please try logging in to your child's Google Account on or before September 21st prior to our Virtual Meet the Teacher Night. An email was sent Monday morning with your child's google account information. Check their educbe gmail account for an invite to our Google Classroom
• September 24th  is our Virtual Meet the Teacher Night. We have two sessions scheduled from 6pm-6:45pm or 7pm-7:45pm. We will be using Google Meet. Please check your email for the meet code and information about how to join. There are two sessions and you will only log on for one of them
• Subscribe to this blog! I will use this blog to post learning updates and important information.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns 

Ms. Fieldstone 

sifieldstone@cbe.ab.ca