Ms. McDonald and Mrs. Ballach's Class Blog: 2015

Saturday, 28 November 2015

Here are some of the things we've been up to lately.

Here is a peek at students in gym. Ms. Navratil works them hard!

In addition to our pink clothes we put on a bit of extra pink our nails.

Classrooms throughout the school were asked to make something for

Pink Day to show how we standing up to bullying.

Full of school spirit - Go Bulldogs!

Our students are becoming such great readers, when Ms. McDonald and Mrs. Ballach need a break we can just ask a someone to take over the Read Aloud!

Students have been busy recording "Mm" words from around our classroom.

But our favourite M word this week was Moustache!!!

Of course we had to remove them for our ice cream party -

no one wants ice cream on their moustache!

We have been working with numbers in math. Our goals are to use, read and represent numbers in a variety of meaningful ways. Here are some examples of how we have been working on this is class.

Students take turns being "The Count". The count's jobs are to count a selection of items in a bag using our "good counting strategies" - put objects in a line, point to each object 1 time, and count slowly. We also work on representing numbers in a variety of ways including pictures, numbers and words.

We spend a lot of time working on developing one-to-one correspondence a give students variety of ways to practice this still during activity time. We play games using a certain number of objects to build. We also made our own dominos and have build a big domino board in our hallway.

14 blocks high!

Here is an example of a number line students made in class. Students use the number line as a reference tool when reading and representing numbers.

One way for students develop a strong sense of what numbers mean is to relate them to their own life so they think and talk about numbers in meaningful ways. In this task students represented the number of people in their family.

You can your child develop a strong sense of numbers by exploring and talking about numbers in meaningful ways at home. Ask your child to put one fork on the table for each person at the table, count the people in the car, pose simple problems such as "There are four of us watching a movie. If Grandma and Grandpa came over how many more people would we have?'

Sunday, 15 November 2015

Here are pictures of some of the things
we've been up to at school.

Ms. Bullock is with our class two times each week for music. On this day she brought in instruments and students got to experiment with them during activity time.

Helping a friend who is stuck:

Zippers are a big milestone in Kindergarten! Many of our students are able to do up their own zipper independently, some are still working on it.

Here is our class at the Terry Fox Run. Each student coloured and cut out a shoe to symbolize the steps they are taking in memory of Terry Fox.

We try to use real life objects to inspire conversation, writing and art.

"The pumpkins are having cake."

Ask how our playdough turned green.

Apple Tasting

We brought in 3 different types of apples and with the help of a mom who joined us for the morning, students sampled one of each.

Students used stickers to show which apple they liked best.

We began our study of numbers with an activity asking students to make "Witch's Brew". This task gave students the opportunity to work on identifying numbers and making small quantities. It also provided students the opportunity to practice using picture clues during reading and lead to students writing recipes for their own Witch's Brew.