First Week of March

In the last week of February the grapes class has been very busy. We learnt  a new song called 'I like the flowers' 

We can talk about the things we like. We can talk about the fruit we like to eat, and the toys we like to play with. We like to talk.

We have also been learning shapes. We are very good at naming shapes. We like  to practice matching the shapes when teacher calls out the name, we must find the hidden shape in the class room. It is a fun game. When we find the shape in 10 seconds we must sit down and say the name very clearly for everyone to understand. 

Grapes class are very good at reading together. Our book 'I love school' has many words we already know, so our teacher does not need to help us very much. We know we will love school too one day.

We are very excited because in March we will learn about farm animals. Please read our blog again next week so we can share our experiences with you too.

January 12-16

This week was my last week at the kindergarten so we did a lot of practicing and we began learning a few new skills to help with their reading skills. One of the main focuses of this week was blending sounds, and recognizing the ending sounds in words such a man, can, fan, ten, pen, fin, tin and fun. Letter recognition is a very important part of reading! We also worked on our sight words. We added a few new words such as with, what, has, they, into, have, so, you and like. We practiced these words with a few activities using flash cards and an board activity! This week for writing we practiced writing the letters r and s and learning many words that begin with the letters to reinforce our letter recognition skills. For theme we continued working on seasons and focused on summer with a few puzzle activities and a short cartoon about summer! We learned a lot of new vocabulary words to describe the season, weather and activities we can do in the summer. In our phonics workbook we practiced the letters s and t. We practiced writing, saying and spelling turtle, tiger, tent, sky, snake, and spider. We still need a bit more practice, but we did a really good job beginning with the work this week! As this was my last week we played a few of our favourite games such as bingo, letter recognition board game, memory and sticky ball sight words! It was a really great and fun last week - I will miss them all very much, but I'm so proud of all of their progress! They have certainly learned a lot over the past few months in my class! Dean, Jayme, and Art are very smart and very sweet kids and I will miss them!!!

December 5-9

This week we worked on our phonics skills and began working on the letters s and t in our workbooks. We practiced the sounds of the s and t words to practice our letter recognition skills and worked on learning and remembering our new s and t vocabulary words from our phonics section. For writing this week we continued working on the letter q and began working on the letter p. It's very important that we can differentiate between the letter p and q as well as the sounds they make. We completed a couple fill in the correct letter sheets where we had to identify the sound and write the correct letter while focusing on p and q. We added a number of new p and q words to our vocabulary to help us practice our letter recognition skills. We focused on reading and sight words this week by adding a number of new words to our list! We completed a number of activities including sticky ball sight words to practice remembering the words on sight quickly! We are also beginning to learn how to spell and recognize colours such as red, blue, yellow, purple, orange, and green. We worked on improving our math skills with writing and recognizing the numbers 1-30. We completed a number of worksheets and played a few fun game to practice and improve our math skills. This month we've begun the theme of seasons and we began with winter since it is winter! We talked about the weather we see in writer and different activities that we can do in the winter such a skating, building snowmen, and sledding. We watched a short cartoon about skating in the winter time to strengthen our understanding of winter and the vocabulary used to describe winter weather and activities.

December 29-31

We had a very short week this week due to the long weekend so we spent a lot of our class time focusing on reviewing our phonics vocabulary words. At the beginning of the week we went on a fantastic field trip to Hakka Cultural Park. We had a lot of fun learning and exploring the park! Once we were back in the classroom on Tuesday we completed a number of review worksheet to practice and review everything we have been learning up to this point. We continued practicing our letter recognition and phonemic awareness skills with a number of activities this week! We played alphabet bean bag and letter recognition bingo! The letter of the week that we focused on was the letter "p". We practiced our writing skills with the focal point being writing big and small "p" properly. We also learned a number of new words beginning with the letter "p". We also worked on our math skills this week. We completed a number to work sheets, as well as practiced writing and counting numbers with activities. Finally we focused on reading, listening, and oral skills by adding more sight words to our vocabulary and practice reading together. We had a great week of learning and fun! I can't wait see everyone's smiling faces after the long weekend!

December 22-27

This was our last week of December and so wrapped up our theme of the month and a few of our focal vocabulary words this month. We finished the month of December and our theme of Christmas with our Christmas performance and party! We had a lot of fun showing everyone our hard work and we hope everyone enjoyed the performance! After our performance we got a chance to play a few christmas themed games, such as finding presents and then unwrapping presents with gloves, and a few other really fun Christmas themed games! We has a lot of fun and we all got little presents to keep as little Christmas gifts! To wrap up our theme of Christmas we made Christmas stockings and hung them on our classroom door in hopes that Santa clause would leave us a little presents for being good this year! After Christmas we began another theme of weather and seasons which we will continue working on into the beginning of January. For the theme of weather and season we began with a short cartoon about weather and a worksheet to reinforce everything we learned from the video. We continued working on our phonics and phonetic awareness skills this week with a number of activities and worksheets. We finished our work on the letters r and q in our workbook. We learned a number of new words beginning with the letters r and q including quiet, quilt, question, rainbow, robot, red, and rose. We also practiced our phonetics and letter recognition skills with a few activities including letter recognition bingo, "erase" to the board, and a letter recognition board game. We have become very good at recognizing the different sounds of the letters which is an essential skill for learning how to spell and read properly. We used play dough as a tool to help us build letters and shapes for practice. For vocabulary this week and this month we practiced with flashcards by playing "memory" and go fish - through these activities we were able to practice our understanding and recognition skills. We added a number of new sight words to our list of words and we practiced recognizing and spelling them with worksheets and a race to the sight word activity. We also read a book together to practice our listening, reading, and oral skills. This week for our writing practice we practiced writing with the focus on the letter "o". We practiced writing and learning a number of new vocabulary words beginning with the letter "o" including octopus, oranges, oval, owl, and ostrich. We had a very busy and very fun week of learning and I can't wait to see everyone's smiling faces bright early Monday morning!

December 15 - 19

This week we spent time working on our theme of Christmas, and practicing our songs, speeches, and dances for the upcoming performance! We are all very excited for Christmas and we want to make sure we work hard to show everyone all the hard work we've put into our Christmas practices! For the theme of Christmas this week we talked about Santa clause, and all the things we are grateful for and the things we like about Christmas (and the gifts we hope Santa will bring us!) To help practice vocabulary and learn more about Christmas we watched a short cartoon about Franklin the Turtle donating a Christmas gift to less fortunate children. We also made a few crafts this week including Santa clauses made from tracing our hands and drawing and colouring in Santa. It was a lot of fun and we put them up around our classroom to help us get into the Christmas spirit! We also worked on phonics this week with the focus on the letter recognition of the letters r and q. We worked hard to add a few new words beginning with r and q to our vocabulary! So far we have added the words rainbow, queen, quiz, question, and we will continue practicing and adding more words next week! We practiced our letter recognition and spelling skills with a few activities including memory, go fish, and letter-bingo. We worked on math this week as well by practicing our number writing and counting skills with both worksheets and an activity where we use blocks to aid us in our adding skills. For writing this week on the letter n. We practiced writing little and big N's and learned new words that begin with n, as well as reinforcing our letter recognition of the letter n sound. We finished the week off with reading a book about apple picking to practice our listening, reading, and verbal skills. We recognized a number of our sight words while reading and added a few new words to our vocabulary while reading! We had a great week and we are excited for Christmas next week and I can't wait to see all their smiling faces on Monday morning!

December 8 - 12

We are getting closer to Christmas as we continue our classes into December and we are very excited to celebrate Christmas together! We worked very hard on our Christmas speeches, songs, and dances this week so that we are prepared for our Christmas performance next week. For the theme this week we continued to work on Christmas and winter, so we made a few crafts! We made Christmas ornaments, Christmas stockings, and we talked about Santa clause and all the things we hope he'll bring us this year, and all the things we are grateful for. We also watched a short cartoon about Frosty the Snowman and talked about all the fun things we can do in the winter when it snows. We also worked on a number of worksheets in our phonics workbook. This week we focused on the letters n and p. we practiced our vocabulary, spelling, and phonics of many words that begin with the letters and p. We practiced letter recognition for all of the letters of the alphabet with a few activities. We played a board game where we had to recognize the picture and the letter to move forward, we also played go fish and memory to continue our practice. We worked on math and writing this week. We focused on writing that letter m and writing numbers 1, 2 and 3. We completed a number of writing and math worksheets to reinforce our skills. We also read a book together and practiced our sight words as well as our oral, and reading skills. We had a fantastic week of fun learning, and I can't wait to see everyone's faces on Monday morning!