Field Trip to Butterfield Acres Farm

Next Friday, May 6th we will be going to Butterfield Acres.  Again I will need some volunteers.  The field trip forms will be coming home tomorrow.  Please fill them out and return them as soon as possible.  They will need to bring a lunch to eat there.

Safety City

Wow!  Our field trip was wonderful.  We could not have done it without all of our amazing volunteers (I hope you all enjoyed yourself as well).  We learnt about different traffic signs.

This is a yield sign.  It is for cars and bikes not walking people.

Crosswalk.  Stay in between the white lines.  Look left, right then left again.

They had a tiny city for us to practice in.  One side was the city with lots of little city building and the other side was country and had a bunch of country buildings.  We all had a chance to be drivers and pedestrians.  I think it is safe to say none of us should be driving any time soon as we had a lot of trouble staying on our side of the road.  Ha ha!

Here I come.  Wait what side am I supposed to be on? 

Rules?  Who needs rules?

Here comes trouble.  We are not really following the rules. 

I did it.  I stopped before the line.

Oops!  Someone is crossing.

After a great deal of fun practicing our driving skills.  For some of the children they found the tricycle difficult as they have been riding two wheel bikes for a while now.  It was time for our group photo and snack.  Here we go!  Everyone say cheese.  Wait can you even see the sun is so bright?

Tomorrow's Field Trip

Thursday is our trip to Safety City.  The children are very excited.  Please remember that they will be coming in for the full day.  We will be at Safety City from 9:00 am until 11:40 am and then will return to school for lunch and some afternoon activities.  I will be sending a paper list of things to remember for the trip but they are also listed below.

Please make sure your child has:

• Sun Hat
• Bike Helmet 
• Water Bottle with water in it
• Snack
• Lunch (if you have not already ordered pizza)

It is supposed be very warm out tomorrow.  Please put sunscreen on your child before they come to school.  If you would like it to be reapplied, you may send it in there backpack and I will help them to put it on.

Making Trees with Our Buddies

Today we also had fun making paper bag trees.  Our buddy class came down to the Kindergarten class and helped us make paper bag trees.

Working with Letters

WE have done it.  We made it through the entire alphabet.  We will continue to practice are letters and letter sounds but will no longer be focusing on one letter a week.  This week was the letter was "Y".  It has four different sounds.  Ask your child about it.

We have also started to focus on reading strategies.  One of them was sounding out many different words.  We also talked about skipping over the word you don't know reading the others and filling it in with what makes sense (I have been doing this during read alouds) as well looking at the picture to try and figure out the word.  Today we played a game with pictures where we knew what the picture was and tried to figure out what the beginning and ending sounds of the words were. 

Planting Pumpkins

It is a very exciting time of year.  The Kindergarten children were very excited that they are going to be able to plant something in the big garden out front of the school.  We started our pumpkins the classroom.  A set of lovely volunteers brought in all of the things we needed and even drew us picture step by step instructions to follow.

Field Trip and Pizza Day

Many of you have asked.  What about pizza day?  It is on the same day as the field trip.  I have double checked with the wonderful organizer of the pizza days has said that we can also have the pizza in Kindergarten.  If you are still interested in the pizza lunch please send in your forms as soon as possible.

Your child will still need a water bottle and a snack that day if you order their lunch.

Field Trip

Next week is our field trip and there are still some people that have not handed in their field trip forms.  I also need to send a few back as there was a medical form on the back of the forms that needs to be filled out and some of us overlooked that piece.  If your child does not have a bike helmet please let me know as this is a very important thing to have for this field trip.

Thank you and I will soon be sending home the forms for Butterfield Acres.

Looking for Some Fun things to Do?

I have been hearing of some fun things that you might want to do with your children.

The first one is FREE.  Thank you to one of my morning parents I found out that you can take you and your family to the Glenbow museum downtown for free the first Thursday of every month from 5 to 9 pm.

The Saturday Morning All You Can Eat Cereal Cartoon Party (April 16th).  I have been to this one the last couple of years.  It is put on by the Calgary Underground Film Festival.  They have some really old cartoons and funny commercials of old toys.  The tickets are $6 for children and $12 for adults.  Yes! The cereal for the most part is sugary but it is only one morning and many of the kids I have seen wear pajamas.  They do also have different types of milk for those people who are lactose intolerant.  

A bit of a healthier option would be to register for the Bowness Run.  I hear that there is a competition to see which school in the Bowness area will have the most participants.  Let's work together to make it Belvedere Parkway.  Early Registration has started.

There is also another outdoor one that looks like a great deal of fun called Slide the City.  This is an event where there is going to be one very large slip and slide.

If you hear of an event that you and your family are going to and would like me to tell other families please email me.

Have a great weekend!

2 D and 3 D shape

The children have been working so hard at looking at and learning the name of different shapes.  We made different shapes using marshmallows and toothpicks.  The children were given very little instruction on how to make the 2 and 3 dimensional shapes.  We also had a talk about how it might be hard to make cones, spheres and cylinders as there is no way to bend the toothpicks.  This did not stop them from trying.

I made a rectangle using 6 marshmallows and 6 toothpicks. 

I tried to make a sphere.

I made two squares.

Artist in Residence

We had our first turn with the artist in residence today.  Thank you all for not wearing your best clothes.  Our next day for the artist in residence will be next Friday the 15th.  Again please do not send your child in brand new clothes.  If there are other dates that we will be doing this I will let you know.

This Friday is early dismissal.  It is the morning kindergarten children that will be in that day.

Today in Kindergarten

Many of us had fun painting with the artist in residence.  We painted inside a square of our very own. There were three circles inside the square and then the background.  We were able to choose our very own colours.

We are also currently working on 3 D shapes.  They like to sing the song  the 3 D shape rap here is a link to the Song.  We are pretty good at identifying a sphere, cone, cylinder, cube and a pyramid.  The new shape we learnt today is called a rectangular prism.  It is tricky to say.  Today we worked on deciding which 3 D shapes rolled, stacked and were able to slide.

We started to build with different shapes and talk about them.

My tower has 4 rectangular prisms, 1 cylinder, 2 cubes and a pyramid. said by L 

Look at the flower we made.

Look at my sun.

It is easy to make a duck.

We found that juice boxes are rectangular prisms and that a lot of are snack containers are cylinders.  The homework for this week is to try and find a 3 D shape somewhere in your home and be able to tell me what it is and what shape it is.  Have fun finding all the different shapes.

The Letter V

We have almost completed all of the letters of the alphabet.  This week we worked on the letter 'v'. The children needed some help making the proper sound as some would add an a and say va va.  We corrected this by telling them to put their top teeth on their lower lip and making it vibrate with the vvvv sound.  We talked about how it tickled a little when we would do it for a long time.  We also practiced making the letter around the room.  As our printing has come a long way from the beginning of the year we also practiced writing some of the v letters we came up with on a white board.  First they write them down and then I ask them what the word is that they copied.

We only have two letters left to cover.  After that we will continue to review letter and letter sounds but will also be working on word families (at, hat, cat, bat are all in the at word family).

Upcoming Field Trips

Okay,

I have been busy booking some field trips over the last few weeks and will need some volunteers. Here are the dates and locations for the trips:


April 21st:  Safety City (field trip forms will be sent home please return as soon as possible)
May 6th: Butterfield Acres (to see all the spring babies)
June 15th: Inglewood Bird Sanctuary

These will be full days of school for the children.  More details to follow as they get closer.  I am also hoping to get in another walk or two to Bowness Park to looks for signs of the seasonal changes. Thank you all in advance for joining us on the trips we could not do it without you.

You can sign up on the volunteer site as well.