Curiosities for Kids

Last week we took a journey through the story . iitsisaanoowa (Christina Fox) shares her story about her experience at a residential school. I want to thank for bringing this book to my attention and Christina for creating it. We love the message of love and hope and we love the art work. This book will continue to be a part of our daily learning and experiences this year.

Every weekend since school has started I've been in on a Saturday or Sunday. Trying to get ahead 😫. Like most of us...that's not happening. Today when I was feeling overwhelmed with cleaning, organizing and planning for the week ahead I decided to work on our art display.
These sunflower paintings make me happy. 🌻

Yesterday we learned about groups and worked together to make play dough. Today we painted the play dough. This was so engaging for our young learners and would probably be for any age.
I heard so many, "wows" and "that's amazing ".
The students could not stop asking me to come look at the colours they created!

I took some inspiration from and to create individual math bins and math mats.
Last week we started using these materials. We are keeping it pretty simple for now. Focusing on counting and number recognition skills. Using my interactive white board we played dice games and I modelled how to represent numbers using the the tens frame. The plan is to add to the bins as we explore more numeracy concepts.

Tape resist alphabet posters. It was so satisfying peeling the tape off these beauties.
This was our for the week. Something we worked on together but everyone had their own paint, brushes and letter to paint.
I plan to add to these over the year as we learn more about letters and sounds. We will add lowercase letters and guided drawings to the bottom half.

Alphabet soup
These simple recipe cards were a freebie from tpt store.

Each of our "mini cohorts" aka "learning groups" got a big bag of bowls, spoons, magnet letters, recipe cards and some fun extras to make alphabet soup in the house centre this week.

Our learning groups rotate through 2 to 3 play centres before recess per day, we have a total of 5 centres at the moment. Each group has their own materials for each centre. I pass each group a bag, send them to their centre and when it's clean up time they place all the materials back in the bag and the bag goes in a big "dirty bin". We try to wash everything in the dirty bin daily.

So far it's working. Most students, with the exception of 1 or 2, are engaged and sticking with their groups. I'm lucky enough to have 2 amazing EAs for now....who, if not providing 1 on 1 support for students, are getting things cleaned. One way we are trying to reduce the amount of sharing and cleaning are individual bins, such as the sensory bins I've shared and today we started math bins (I'll post about them later this week).

All is good in Kindergarten

Classroom mission statements.

In our classroom we LEAD!
L earn
E xplore
A ccept each other
D o our best

These little handprints were the student's way of promising to be Super Leaders everyday. They will be added to our leader board and over the next weeks we will discuss what it really means to be a leader.

Well, my first week back to teaching is complete. Answering to Mrs. Gerein vs mama or Ashley was kind of nice.
The best part about this week was seeing how excited my students were on their first day of school. Also, going home by noon everyday is pretty 👌.
If I'm going to be honest...it was exhausting too. My two year old has decided he would start crying for mom all hours of the night.
I'm not sure how my amazing EA and I are going to keep up with sanitizing and I haven't figured out how to breathe properly while masked and reading aloud or speaking all morning.
Enjoy your long weekend everyone 🍻.

Welcome to Kindergarten.
I'm up way too early of course, in anticipation of the first day of school.
My first day of teaching kindergarten won't be exactly how I had imagined but it will be good. It's all good, we got this!

Individual sensory bins.
Will you be able to provide sensory play this year in your classroom?
I went from 32 students to 19 this week and fortunately do not have to combine with another class or grade 🙏🏼 (I am the only half day kinder room in the school).
I had the idea to try a weekly bin shop for the students and feel it will be so much more manageable now that I have less students.
The plan is to have a choice between 2 fillers (kinetic sand or playdough).
Choose some tools (cups, scoops or tongs).
And the best part, fun extras! Sealife or zoo animals for next week.
Everything will be individual, we will add to the bins throughout the week if needed and anything that cannot be sanitized or quarantined (ie. Playdough) will be sent home at the end of the week. Each week we will provide different choices.
This will be totally trial and error, my hope is that students will engage in the sensory experience and myself and my EA will not feel overwhelmed with cleaning.

Birthday crowns 👑!
This weekend I tried to focus on start of the school year traditions rather than stress about physical distancing, no singing, mask wearing and hand washing.....😬.
Normally I prep all the student's birthday crowns at the beginning of the year and bring them out monthly for students to decorate throughout the year. I'm changing it up a little this year. What better way to kick off the first day of school than decorating your own birthday crown? Something else I changed is using all the cereal and cracker boxes I've been collecting rather than cutting crowns from construction paper.
Can't wait to see how these will look in a few weeks.

Started a little first day of school gift for my students.
After seeing painted rocks she makes for her students, I had planned to go rock picking by the river today. Then I came across a box of wood peg dolls in the basement 🤗.
This year we are all going to need to channel our inner superheroes.
When finished, these little superheroes will be a reminder that there's a superhero in us all.
🦸🏽‍♀️🦹‍♀️🦹🏿‍♂️🦸‍♂️

I'll share the finished product later in my stories.