Week of Jan 5

We welcomed students back with open arms and smiling faces this week! It was so great to have all the kids back in the classroom, seeing friends, and sharing what they did over the break.

In the classroom we introduced our new EA Ms. Mascha who has been a lovely addition to our space and has made some really amazing connections with the students already. We discussed what makes a good leader and classroom friend and played a game of "copy cat," it has a fun little chant that goes like this:

Lets play copycat just for fun

We will copy (enter child's name) s/hes the one

Whatever s/he does we'll do the same

Lets all play the copycat game

It led to some pretty cool moves that we all followed, what a talented bunch. We started sounding out words and counting out the number of sounds we can hear. This type of phonemic decoding is necessary to start reading and writing with confidence and fluency. We continued with practicing our rhyming and are having a great time building and breaking apart compound words. We also started printing our name on a line, instead of just copying it into a space. We are working on uniform letter formation and strengthening the small muscles in our hands that allow us to print at a smaller size.

In math we are working on part–part–whole, creating number bonds such as 5 can be broken into 0+5, 1+4, 2+3, 3+2, 4+1, and 5+0, and using our ten frames to become more fluent in counting, composing, and decomposing numbers. This helps students build a strong understanding of how numbers relate to one another and supports addition and subtraction skills.

We played outside during recess, I'm only with the morning students during recess, the afternoon class joins the whole school, so I only get pictures of the AM class. However with the nice weather scheduled for this week, I am hoping to have a recess class outside. The kids had a blast in the new construction site that is our dramatic play area this month. We had some students pretend to be the teacher and host their own class during centre time. Build and Boom was a very popular game this week, and the new balance board I brought in has provided endless opportunities for practicing different poses and stunts.

All in all it was an AMAZING week! The students have grown a lot during the break and I am excited to see where all this growth takes us. Thank you for all you do as parents, it really makes a difference!