Thank you as always to our valued volunteers! Pizza day helpers you were awesome and snuggles with baby Celine on the side are always a good thing! The kids enjoyed making a poster for the LKS social this week where they wrote about all of the things they liked about their school - it was quite lovely to hear their thoughts and see their efforts when they knew the parents were going to read it! Hope you enjoyed yourself if you were able to make it Friday night. We teachers appreciate all the efforts our parent community puts into fundraising for the school, we are a very lucky community!
Spring is a busy time at LKS as we get ready for our biggest event - Springfest! There are many opportunities to volunteer some of your time to help the day run smoothly if you are available but also keep an eye out for updates on our Springfest class basket. If you are new to us, this is a themed (our chosen theme is superheroes) basket of goodies donated by everyone in the class that gets attractively packaged up and set for auction on the day of Springfest - May 7. The idea is to make the basket irresistible so that bidders will be trying to out-do each other to have it but also feel they got good value for their money. I got a sticker book, an Iron Man kite and a pez candy dispenser and others have added bandaids, toothbrush, towel and more on the same theme. I also added a set of superhero readers and book called "Ten Rules To Be A Superhero" using Scholastic bonus points so let's keep the ball rolling and have fun with this!
Also on the topic of Springfest - if your house is over run by stuffies (stuffed animals of any size, colour, kind) we are collecting donations for the "Adoption Centre". If you have well preserved, clean, gently used stuffies to donate the kids can bring them in and they will be used at Springfest to create an adoption centre where for a few tickets some other child might take buy cast offs and give them a new home! It was a very well received idea last year so collections for this year have begun.
Exciting news for available volunteers - this week Tara will be collecting names of people available to volunteer for our morning with the scientist (April 29) and our class trip (June 15). There are 9 spots available, we are given the ratio of adults to children and cannot exceed this number so
typically in any class there are many more who would like to help out and a lottery is done in order to choose names as fairly as possible. Once the names are collected they will be forwarded to me and we will simply draw out the required number for each event. While you may certainly put your name on both lists, if you are drawn for one event it will cancel out the other name to avoid duplication.
Scientist volunteers will simply come to school for 8:30 and meet with the scientist to go over your station's activity/expectations. The class will rotate through the different stations for the morning. It is busy but fun!
Trip volunteers will be coming on the bus with us and managing a small group of children over the duration of the day. We will leave the school about 10:30 and be back about 2:30. More specific information regarding the trip itself will come on the PERMISSION form which each child must have signed indicating YES or NO they will be coming on the trip. These are not ready from the office yet. If you are opting out of the day for your child you will need to find alternate care as this is "school"for that particular day and all kindergarten classes are going together leaving no kindergarten
staff available at LKS. We will make sure you are alerted when permission forms are sent home and it will be on a "mailbag" day so they are protected in the backpacks! Your trip fee/cost covers the entrance fee at Springridge Farm as well as the transportation cost of the bus and driver. Stay tuned!
We are working on graphing as our math focus. In kindergarten that looks like learning to sort groups based on specific attributes - such as lego blocks by colour, pattern blocks by shape, toys by function, survey questions by answers etc etc and showing the results in an organized way using good math language like "most, least, equal to, more, less" to tell about your results. In ANY math activity through the grades the focus for the children is to "show what you know" using pictures, numbers and words, giving the students multiple ways of explaining/showing the depth of their understanding. We can "read" a graph by simply reiterating the results, such as "blue had 5, red had 2 and white had 1" but a level 4 thinker is the one making clear, concise comparisons such as "blue has 3 more than red". Tricky stuff! You can easily replicate this kind of math at home with any assortment of things. Getting your child to work through and explain the results is the meat of the exercise but they have
been enjoying themselves with it in class!
This week looks like:
Monday- Music PM
Tuesday - Mailbags, Mystery Reader PM
Wednesday - LIB/IT PM Day 5
Thursday - Mailbags
Friday - PA Day ( but still Day 2 on our calendars as it was an additional day)
Have a great week!
Ms. I.
