Announcing the debut of winter. With this comes all the shivers and all the clothing. We do encourage students to come well prepared for the cold weather, even if there is no snow. If we are well-dressed, our daily outdoor time will be a pleasure, rather than a struggle. I've invested in my own pair of fuzzy boots so that I can enjoy playing outside with the kids this winter without being cold and uncomfortable!
On wet, slushy days especially, it is very helpful to send extra socks and gloves in the backpack, or we can add them to the extra clothes bag for this season. I know the pain of putting wet mittens back on, and I don't wish that on anyone! Also, please go through your winter gear and make sure every last glove is labeled. We are doing our very best to keep our belongings off the floor and organized, but things will get lost and many of our items look alike. Also, I highly recommend the dollar store for cheap socks and gloves.... they don't last as long, but it's also not a tragedy if they get misplaced! Haha!
To help us manage our clothing, I am encouraging the kids put their assorted small items (hat, scarf, mittens) in their coat sleeves. Please encourage your kids to do the same when they undress at all their other after-school locations so that they get in the habit. Also, whenever you have the time to wait, please do encourage your student to get all dressed up on their own, including boots and zippers (mittens after the zippers). The more practice we get, the better. Don't worry, I have a special talent for helping kids get their mittens over their coat sleeves, and fix their inside out boot liners, but imagine 15 kids sweating in their snowsuits while I do this for everyone!
Ask us about leaves!! This week, we began an investigation into what kinds of leaves we have in the Dewson school yard. It's been really interesting and fun, and there are still more ways we can go with this. We began by collecting a few leaves from each area of the school yard (field, structure, kinder). Then, we each took part in sorting them and glueing them onto our chart. We looked at the completed chart together, and counted up how many of each type of leaf we had collected. We had 10 feuilles d'Érable and slightly fewer of the others. We hadn't collected any feuilles de Février Doré. I asked what we can learn from looking at this chart. We had many responses, all thoughtful and interesting.
- Maybe we have more Maple trees at Dewson because we have the most Maple leaves.
- We can learn the names of the trees.
- Maybe we only have one Mûrier because we only found one leaf.
Following up on the second point, we talked about how, yes, if we look up at any remaining leaves on the trees and they match with one on our chart, we'll be able to identify the type of tree! So, we went outside with a mission to find the trees our leaves fell from. Here are some pictures of us identifying some of the trees. Still looking for that Ginko...
During our search, we found more matching leaves, and a rare bit of fallen Cedar... we'll have to talk about this next time!
Another project this week has been to continue our counting practice by making number posters. The challenge was to use the stickers to build our number, but to organize the stickers so that they would be easy to count. Some students used colours, or patterns, some arranged them in rows, some made sure each row had the same number in it (leading us to the possibility of skip-counting), and some even arranged theirs to look like the number itself! Ask your counter which two numbers they worked on.
On Wednesdays, when Mme Diamond is with us, she is in charge of planning our outdoor activity and leading a reading group meeting. This week, she had us doing a really fun version of a hula hoop bean bag toss with goalies. For some letter work, she made an amazing board game that was so fun that even those of us not in her reading group wanted to try it out!
This week, I also had an amazing time designing my own farm buildings out of the logs (my favourite childhood toy), and watched many different students sort our animals into their various pens.
Some more building...
Finally, I'm sure I've mentioned how much pleasure I get from watching the kids lead their own activities after I've shown them how to do it once. A while ago, we did those Halloween relay races and they've designed their own a few times since then. This one, complete with a jump and zig zags, became so popular that almost the whole class was lined up to participate!
Bonne fin de semaine, and please return those activity bags Monday!!
Oh, wait! Small bit of shameless self-promotion... My group's gig, which was cancelled at the last minute at the end of September, has been rescheduled for next Saturday December 1st. See poster for details. If you can make it, it's family friendly and I would love to see you there!!
