100 Days of Kindergarten!!

This week we celebrated being in Kindergarten for 100 Days.  100 is a really big number when you are five!   Since the first day of school, we have added one picture to a ten frame each day to help us keep track of how many days we have been in Kindergarten. With every picture added to the ten frames, the excitement grew and grew until we finally made it to 100!

We started our day by drawing a monster with 100 body parts.  Our monsters have:

           10 eyes                10 legs
           10 horns              10 feet
           10 teeth              10 stripes
           10 arms               10 spots
           10 hands             10 colours

All the monsters turned out as unique and fabulous as the artists that drew them!


          


We were challenged to lick a Tootsie Pop 100 times to see if we could uncover the yummy candy in the middle.  We kept track of our licks by using a 100 chart. Everyone discovered that is takes MANY more licks...but it sure was fun trying.

We stamped 100 stamps, and kept tracking using 10, ten frames.

And we made 100 Day crowns and counted out 100 Froot Loops and made a delicious necklace.

The Color Monster

Every once in a while, you come across a book that inspires and brings joy to everyone who reads it.  The Color Monster, by Anna Llenas is just that kind of book!

This book has amazing pop-up illustrations that help its young audience explore and identify their own emotions.  The feelings happy, sad, anger, fear and calm are represented with a specific colour.  In the story, the monster's emotions are all mixed up until a little girl helps him separate his feelings into different jars.

After reading this book, we spent the week talking about our feelings and what makes us feel that way.

To get us started, we went on an emotion hunt and took pictures of our friends showing the five different emotions in the book.

After practicing showing the different emotions, we did lots of talking about what could make us feel those feelings.  Everyone was very eager to share!  We organized our thoughts into jars just like the Color Monster did in the story.

Valentine Party Fun!

The Morning Party

The Afternoon Party

Love and Valentines...

To show the special people in our lives how much we love them, we made special handmade paper and turned it into a valentine card.

To make our paper, we went to the office and got some shredded paper.  We then added water and food colouring and let it get really mushy over the weekend.  We learned to dip the heart shaped screen into the paper pulp and pull it up.  We squeezed out most of the water with our hands and then used a rolling pin to get the rest of the water out of the paper.

While the paper dried, we decided which special person we wanted to give our Valentine too. We then wrote a list of  5 reasons why we love this person.   

Then we wrote in our cards and got to pick out 5 special beads which represent the 5 reason why we love our Valentine.  

The Morning Class

               

The Afternoon Class

               

Global School Play Day

Today we participated in the Global School Play Day.  In Kindergarten, we play everyday, but today was special.  We got to play for the entire day and we got to bring toys from home!  To make the day even better still, we had two different classes join us for play dates.  It is great to have older kids to play with because we learned so many new things.  We also got to know new friends, that we can play outside with at recess.  

The Morning Class

Ms. Dowd was so busy playing that she didn't get too many pictures of the morning class.

The Afternoon Class

A big Thank You to Mrs. Turner and Mrs. du Plessis for taking lots of photos and sharing them!

The Great Kindness Challenge and Bucket Filling

    

From January 25- January 29, schools across the world participated in the Great Kindness Challenge.  This school week is devoted to doing as many acts of kindness as possible.

In Kindergarten, we began the week by reading the book Have You Filled a Bucket Today?  By using the idea that we all have an invisible bucket, it visually shows how our actions and words can help or hurt others. We decided as a class that we all wanted to be bucket fillers, not bucket dippers.

                     

On Monday we created our own buckets out of solo cups.  We decorated them with gems and stars and awaited them being filled by our friends.  A few students were away when we made the buckets, so the next day a few very kind friends spent some of their choice time helping their friend to make their own bucket.  We have such great bucket fillers in our room.

          

Throughout the week, we wrote notes to our friends on hearts and went and filled their buckets.

We also worked on a surprise for our friends.  First, we randomly picked a friends name and then used the app Doodle Buddy to draw a picture and then we wrote something nice about our friend.

    The Morning Class            

                     

                                  The Afternoon Class   
                      

Messy Art and Winter Collages

It is always fun making art especially if you get messy while doing so.  This week we experimented with four different art making techniques.

The first technique we tried was using a white pastel to draw wind and then we painted a watercolour wash on top to make it look like a windy winter day.

Next we stuck foam letters and puzzle pieces onto a white piece of paper.  Then we sponge painted with blue, pink, purple and turquoise over top of the little pieces.  Once the paint dried, we removed the little pieces to find interesting snowflakes.

We even used a pine tree branch to paint with.  We dipped the needles into white paint and printed it onto construction paper.  We were left with a interesting blizzard looking paper.

The last technique we tried was a class favourite!  We mixed paint, water and a little dish soap into a container.  Then we used a straw and blew lots of bubbles.  We pressed a paper onto the bubbles and ended up with circle bubble prints.  So fun!

The following day, we used our beautiful papers and made one final piece of art.  We cut, ripped, and glued the paper to make winter collages.  The finishing touch was to add a black and white photo of the artist playing in the snow. 

Winter Collages - By K am & pm

Picture slideshow personalized with Smilebox

Snowmen Writing

After reading many different books about snowmen, we created our own mini snowmen and displayed them in a diorama. First we drew a snowy background and shaped it into a triangle/corner diorama.  Then we added sticks, buttons, beads and yarn to our white plasticine snowman to make each one special and unique.




Since the beginning of the new year, we have been working extra hard on writing and recognizing letters and the sounds they make.  Every day we work together on different shared writing pieces such as our Star of the Week story, story responses and Instagram posts, etc.

As we write, we do lots of talking and learning about what A Good Writer does.  Here are some of the things we have learned:

• Good writers skip lines
• Good writers put spaces between words
• Good writers say words out loud so they can write down the sounds they hear
• Good writers add details to their writing to make it more exciting
• Good writers write the date and their name

We used our snowmen dioramas to inspire our good writing.

The Morning Class

                              

The Afternoon Class