Environmental Print

Thank you so much for sending in words for our environmental print book! The book is a class favorite already. Unfortunately we can't take the the credit for the idea...Sesame Street beat us to it!

The kids particularly like the food and toy signs in our book. It has them talking about the holidays already. Oh no! :)
Ashley Daley-Creamer

ABC Boom

   In our class we are using the writing program ABC Boom! ABC BOOM! is a multi-sensory handwriting method designed for children in the early years of education. This methodology includes the use of kinesthetic, movement, touch, and vision senses.It provides a solid foundation in handwriting and fosters the automatic motor skills that will help prevent problems with letter reversal, letter direction and handwriting speed. And...IT IS REALLY FUN!
    Here is a video of our students practicing the first stroke "plop". Notice how we don't use pencil and paper...we use our bodies!

Ashley Daley-Creamer

Spirit Squad

     Thursday our Kindergartners will be introduced to their spirit squad. Each student from our class will get to leave our classroom for 45 minutes and go work with another teacher in their classroom. The teacher is in charge of his/her spirit squad for the 45 minutes. Each spirit squad consists of roughly 17 students from grades K-5. Each squad has a name. For example at our school we have the peach penguins, sky blue sharks etc...
    Spirit squads meet once a month. We get together to promote school spirit, develop new friendships and we have fun! At the first spirit squad meeting we will be playing getting to know you games with our groups, creating a squad cheer and/or deciding on a mascot! Don't forget to ask your child what their squad color/mascot is tomorrow after school!

     Go Lime Green Bats! Sorry I couldn't resist a plug for my spirit squad!

Ashley Daley-Creamer

Math/Monarch Monday!

    What a Monday! We have had such an eventful day! The kids are learning the Read To Self behaviors in school. In order to be a good reader we need to practice, practice, practice! In order to practice, we need to use good reading behaviors.  These behaviors are:

Pick a good spot

Stay in one place

Get started right away

Read quietly

Read the whole time

Here is a great example of someone from our class who is doing excellent when it comes to reading to self!

          In Math, we continue to work away on patterns. Today the kids made pattern bracelets out of (peanut free) cereal and string. I'm not sure how many bracelets made it home in one piece (the kids were hungry during Math for good reason) but here are a few shots of some of the lovely pattern jewellery our kids made.

First we made our pattern on our desk. Then we checked to make sure it repeated and looked for mistakes. Finally we put the cereal on our string.

Madalyn and Ryan's finished bracelets.

Denny hard at work.

    It was such a beautiful day outside! I couldn't resist taking the students out to draw patterns on the basketball court. It beat drawing patterns on paper! I was amazed at some of the patterns the kids came up with. Some kids made patterns that were longer than them. I had a few kids label their patterns. WOWIE!

Ryan made a very long shape pattern. Can you guess what comes next?

Maggie made a circle square circle square etc pattern. She even labelled it ABAB. Smart girl!

Up close

kai was a pattern making machine. Here are 5 different patterns Kai made.

Ben and Angus worked together to make an ABBABB pattern with two different colors.

     We had a great Monday. However, the kids were a little sad this afternoon. We had to set Katie the butterfly free. Katie has to fly a very long way in order to get to Mexico. She needs to get there before Winter! We invited our principal and vice principal down to our room to say goodbye to our butterfly. Brenden decided that tomorrow we should all go down to Mexico to look for Katie. Field trip anyone? :)

Beautiful Monarchs in Mexico. They cover the trees! There are so many Monarchs down in Mexico!

Ashley Daley-Creamer

Happy Birthday...

Wow! We have had 3 Birthdays so far this month! One was Gregory's on September 1st, one belonged to Addison on September 23rd and.....

OUR BEAUTIFUL MONARCH WAS BORN TODAY!

Boys and Girls...there are NO dots on the monarch's wings. Is it a boy or a girl? Do we need to change Katie's name...or is the name still okay?

Ashley Daley-Creamer

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

  This month we have been talking a lot about butterflies. Monarch butterflies to be precise. Katie the caterpillar is now cozy in her chrysalis and we are patiently waiting for her to change into a beautiful Monarch butterfly. So it comes as no surprise that we have butterflies on the brain. Today we did some sequencing work with the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. Tomorrow, after another read, our kindergartners will draw their favorite part of the story and label their picture.

   Check out the video above. It is a really cute video of the book. We watched it today during our lunch. The kids really enjoyed it!
Ashley Daley-Creamer

Pictures



CHEESE! Hooray for picture day!



I just took a peek at the class pictures-they are so cute! I am very happy to report we were the first class to be photographed so we are all neat and tidy in our pictures. I am sending home the proofs tonight.


Ashley Daley-Creamer

Monday September 19th

    Well it was another fun filled/busy day in Kindergarten. We have been working on sorting and patterns, the letter Aa and we now have writing buddies. Our writing buddies will be coming to our class every Monday during our literacy block. Our buddies are in Gr. 3 Costello and are very excited to be working with our students (and our little ones are equally as excited to be working with the "big" kids). Here are a few pictures of what we did in class today!

Our students working on the "All About Me" booklet with their big writing buddies.

Our big buddies help us spell words and read the questions in our booklet!

Our big buddies are helping us do a fabulous job with our writing!

After buddies, we learned more about the letter Aa. We went outside and practiced making A's on the pavement.

Some of the A's were larger than the kids!

 We have been working on sorting and patterns. Today, we tried making some patterns of our own.

Our patterns turned out pretty great! The kids worked very hard.

Remember tomorrow is picture day! Smile! :)

Ashley Daley-Creamer



Picture Day

Class pictures will be on Tuesday September 20th.

PRACTICE THOSE SMILES! :)

Ashley Daley-Creamer

Letter of the Week...Ss

  This week we have been learning all about the letter Ss. You may have been wondering-why is my child coming home hissing at me? Well, they are simply practicing the sound of Ss! We have been reading Ss poems, Ss books and doing many fun activities to help us learn the letter Ss. Here are a few pictures of the Ss activities we have done this past week.

We drew pictures of all the things we could think of that began with the letter Ss. Ryan drew a spider, a sun and a snail.

More of the kids making lovely Ss pictures.

We practiced printing the letter Ss. Caleb made so many!

We were even detectives this week-the kids used magnifying glasses to find the letter Ss in the newspaper. They had to higlight the Ss to prove that they were successful detectives!

The kids worked with play dough-a lot! We made things that begin with the letter Ss-like the sun pictured above.

Here is a school (green) and a snake (purple)

Making the letter S in our play dough

Ta Da!

Due to some rain in the morning, the kids had to come inside. So we coloured some beautiful Ss pages and then added some Ss pictures to the page ourselves.

Ashley Daley-Creamer

Saturday Surprise

I was in our school this morning with Mrs. Josselyn preparing some fun Math activities when I noticed Katie caterpillar was hanging upside down in her house. Her body was in the shape of the letter J. Yesterday Katie escaped her house and we found her hanging from Izzie's cubby. I told our class that she must be getting ready to become a butterfly because monarch caterpillars like to take walks to find a nice quiet place to make their chrysalis. Here is a video of Katie in the J shape on Saturday morning...

Since we will miss Katie caterpillar splitting and making her chrysalis I have also included the video below. Don't worry boys and girls this doesn't hurt Katie to do this. It feels nice because her skin is now too small for her!  I guess she ate too many milkweed plants!

Have a great weekend!

Ashley Daley-Creamer

Favorite part of today...

       Before my new crew of K's left today, I asked them about their favorite part of the day. What will you talk about with mom and dad? What will you remember forever? Here are a few or the responses I received:

Caleb- I'm gonna do the kissing hand to my mom. I liked that book! (You will all meet Chester the raccoon very soon!)

Addison- I love the bus! (The bus seemed to be a favorite conversation topic today)

Madalyn- I liked Music. (The teacher in our music room had them singing and dancing today. It was a riot watching them bust a move!)

Paige- Everything was my favorite! (Yes-just what I wanted to hear!)

Emily-I really liked my outfit. (We have a little fashionista on our hands!)

Ryan- I liked when I saw my brother. There was blood! (Ryan's poor big brother scraped his arm today-Ryan thought it was pretty cool that he was so brave.)

Angus- I liked the playground and the bus.
Alex (in response to Angus)-Me too!
Angus-Me three!
Alex-Me four!
Angus-Me 163! (I believe I have a couple of comedians on my hands! Ha ha too cute!)

Kai-I think I'll do the kissing hand thing to my mom and tell her I love her. (What a sweetie)

Gregory- I liked Chester. (Greg was Chester the raccoon's babysitter today)

What a fabulous two days I have had with all of our K's! I can't wait to see them all together tomorrow!
Ashley Daley-Creamer

Overheard in the classroom today...

Rebecca- I love the rainbow land! (referring to the Dreamland playground)

Nora- I can't read, but I'm gonna learn! (You go girl!)

Ava -We are doing so much work and I'm not even tired! :)

Maggie- I'm happy because I get to see my sister on the bus! (Elizabeth you are one lucky older sister!)

Denny- Mommy packed me a pretty good sandwich for lunch. It has mayonnaise, tuna and some other stuff on it. Can we eat yet? (Too cute-it was only 9:30)

Ben- So who likes Nintendo guys? (The kids were so silent at snack time. Thankfully our buddy Ben helped get the kids at his table better acquainted with one another!)

Izzie-I'm pretty good at writing my name. Look! (She did a beautiful job on her first ever journal entry.)

Sarah-The Gym was my favorite! (And boy were they tired when they came back-drinks from the fountain for everyone!)

Jules- I'm a good helper! (Thank you for helping me with our journals.)

Hazen-I know what I'm going to draw in my journal.
Me- What's that?
Hazen- I can't tell-it wouldn't be a surprise!

Brenden- This is my best day ever! (This was said after Brenden discovered his buddy is in the coatroom across from ours.)

Day # 1 down! The kids were well behaved and worked very hard. I can't wait to see them all again Thursday. Everyone will meet then-21 kids altogether!

Ashley Daley-Creamer