Thank you as always to our valued volunteers, mailbag book swapping and Mystery Readers were up and running this week even with our crazy weather adventures! Many thanks!
It was a pleasure to come back and see all those smiling faces Monday morning, it truly is a privilege to share the children's time with you! By Friday there were many a tired looking, worn out face as we all get back into the routine of school days but healthwise it was the first time in a very long time we actually had 27 of 27 kids for 4 of the 5 days. Just goes to show how restorative a break can be!
Thank you for being mindful of the weather and making sure your child had everything they needed to be comfortable at outdoor play times. You might consider putting a second pair of mitts into your child's backpack - with their name on them please- as sometimes they can't be in the dryer for long enough to actually get fully dried. If I put mitts into the dryer and another class also needs the dryer, things aren't fully dry when we take them out. You can imagine that SHARING the dryer - having 2 classes in at the same time so that things could be in longer doesn't work since having the kids identify their mitts is next to impossible with all the doubles we have and so many without names in them. Tell and show your child the second pair so that they know they have an option to the soggy ones! Having said that...please empty the backpacks each night as part of your routine - the kids can be doing this so that wet things don't come back the next day still wet, waterbottles get emptied and rinsed and library bags or mailbags get taken out until the day they need to come back.
By introducing these routines in Kindergarten you are setting your child up for success in the higher grades when there are more things to come out each day such as agendas or homework and more organization is needed. In Kindie years, my children each had a plastic bin that they decorated with stickers and put their names on - anything that came out of backpacks lived in those tubs when not in the backpacks and those bins lived by the door where we came in at night. They undid their bags each night into those bins and then once dinner was going or gone and we could look through and
deal with whatever needed attention we would do so. Your child DOES this at school each day so doing it at home also is not a big stretch.
Ownership and responsibility are so important. You may have found on Friday that your child has the SAME mailbag book...it is their responsibility to take mailbags out of backpacks, we cannot have the parent volunteer or Ms. K./Ms. Paldon spending time digging through bags so if your child did NOT take it out, their book was not swapped. Remember that we are all reminding them verbally, the pile of mailbags is physically sitting on the sandbox AND the parent is visibly waiting with the new books to swap in so there are many cues to remind them. Focussing on these tasks in the midst of the social event of everyone arriving is the challenge but not one that will be any different in any grade!
Let's make independence and success the goal and eventually it is the norm.
Next week looks like this:
Monday - Teachers at in-school math workshop, Ms.I. gone for portion of the morning
Tuesday- Mailbags, Music and Mystery Reader AM, Gym PM
Wednesday- Reading Buddies AM
Thursday- *Mailbag, Day 4 Yellow LIB/IT PM, Gym PM
Friday- PA Day
Have a great week!
Ms. I.
