Sunday, March 1, 2015

Moving Towards Inquiry-Based Learning: A Kindergarten Tale



This weekend we (Ms. Dowd and Mrs. Lowe) had the pleasure of presenting at the Byte (Building Your Teaching Experience) conference in Brandon, Manitoba.

We presented on our journey towards teaching using an inquiry-based approach. Over the past three years we have tried to move away from traditional theme-based teaching to a more inquiry-based approach.


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Thursday, February 19, 2015

Colour Hunt

This week we have started to learn about colour.  To begin our inquiry we went on a colour hunt.  We partnered up with a friend, picked one colour and used the app PicCollage on the iPads to create a single colour collage. We looked all around the classroom and took turns taking pictures. When we filled the page with pictures, we added some text.


The Morning Class



The Afternoon Class

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

100 Day!

Today we celebrated 100 Days in Kindergarten! 
Take a look at all the fun we had:

We started the day off by skip Counting to 100 with Koo Koo Kangaroo

And we sang our 100 Day Song


We each made a crown with 100 stamps.




We made structures with 100 cups.


Sometimes they fell down before we could get a picture.

And we counted out 100 hearts, pom poms, play food and animals and put them onto a big picture.  To make it easier, we put the objects onto paper plates so we could count 10 groups of 10.





Our favourite activity was making the 100 day trail mix. It was super yummy eating 100 snacks!  A great big Thank You to all the parents that brought a snack!







Saturday, February 14, 2015

Valentine's Party


Happy Valentine's Day! 


  The Morning Class
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 The Afternoon Class
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Saturday, February 7, 2015

Maps of Our Hearts

Love has been the topic of conversation this week in the kindergarten room.  After our brainstorming session, we were amazed with how many people and things that we love.  To make a visual representation of all the love we have, we each created a Map of our Heart.  We carefully drew a big heart and filled it with all the things that we love.  (family, friends, pets, flowers, sports, kindergarten, books, etc) Then, we painted the hearts with water colours and wrote a list of each picture we drew.  The results are stunning!










On February 13, we will be having our class Valentine's Party and will be delivering our Valentine Cards as one of the activities.  Below is a class list for each Kindergarten class.





Sunday, February 1, 2015

The Great Kindness Challenge

Being kind is a very important lesson we talk about and believe in, in our kindergarten classroom.  This past week was a wonderful way to remind ourselves and others of how easy and fun it is to be kind, and to make it part of everyday life.  All the students at Linwood School took part in The Great Kindness Challenge.  Each day we worked together to do a kind act for others.  


On Monday, we created happy pictures for the residents at Deer Lodge Centre.  We hope that the pictures will bring a smile to their faces. 




On Tuesday we created colourful handprints and added a heart to the middle of the hand to symbolize our commitment to kindness.  The handprints will be mailed to California and counted for the Guinness World Book Record.




On Wednesday, we baked cookies and gave them to another class. The grade 4/5 students really enjoyed our kind act.   




Miss B helped us make our kindness cookies, and she even made some for us too!

Thanks Miss B for the yummy cookies.

On Thursday we wrote a special surprise note for someone.  As a class we wrote to a teacher in our school and then the students wrote to someone that they cared about.


Writing a note to Mom and Dad
A special note and picture to Mrs. L

These two friends wrote special notes to each other

Mrs. McDonald really liked the note the afternoon students gave her

Mrs. Rogala was happily surprised from the note from the morning students.
To end the week, on Friday we made bird feeders with our buddies. It is very important to be kind to all the people in our lives, but just as important to be kind to nature and animals.





We also read the book Extra Yarn and saw how kind the girl was in the story.  With the extra yarn we have, we made beautiful woven hearts.