Thank you as always to our valued volunteers.
This past week we participated in the whole school assembly for Remembrance Day. The Kindergarten classes did so well; listening respectfully and sitting quietly! Our Sparks girls, Kayln and Marissa accompanied the colour guard and Reese and Veronica laid our class wreath on the stage. There were many volunteers to carry and lay our class wreath, despite having to walk past the WHOLE school to do so! We drew names to make our selection and those were the girls. Well done everybody! The class wreaths are now on display in the glass cabinets near the office. It is a tradition at LKS that each class make and carry a wreath for the assembly. They were all quite wonderful!
Our class family is coming together very well. We have new friends, old friends and an overall welcoming feel to the group. They are showing more and more respect for each other, the class and their belongings. Our character trait for November is that of empathy. This is a tough one for our age group! Over-riding the "all about me" attitude of young children is a lengthy but necessary process. Acknowledging how others feel and feeling empathetic for them comes from self-awareness and understanding how we ourselves feel in different situations; then being able to project that it is reasonable others would have the same feelings in similar situations. Compassion develops when children are shown compassionate acts and explicitly helped to understand those. At home: labelling those qualities as and when you see them is great. "Thanks for sharing your toys, you know how hard it is to wait a turn." "Thanks for listening, you know you like it when mom and dad listen to you too." etc etc etc
This week each child will be building their own Rekenrek or math rack; think along the lines of an abacus. It is a tool used to facilitate the development of children's number sense in a visual and tactile way. We will build and keep them in the class for use with problem solving. They will come home to you at a later date but they are incredibly easy to make (beads on pipecleaners on bristol board) and extremely effective if you wish to make one for home also. The JK's will build one to 10 and the SK's to 20. They can be used to learn and solidify counting with one to one correspondence (even the SK's are not always great at this in the tricky teen numbers!) as well as higher level skills like addition and subtraction. Just type it in your search engine and see what pops up! Numeracy skills are just as important as literacy skills, need to be practiced just as literacy skills do and start slow with humble beginnings just as literacy skills do.
This week looks like:
Monday - PM Music
Tuesday - Mailbags, PM Mystery Reader
Wednesday - PM Day 5 LIB/IT
Thursday -
Friday - Mailbags, AM Reading Buddies, AM Mystery Reader, PM Day 2 LIB/IT
Have a great week!
Ms.I.
