Today we read the story North Pole Ninjas. This story is about random acts of kindness. We discussed how and when we could do random acts of kindness for others. Our class in now on a super mission to do random acts of kindness for others at school and at home!

We wrote in our journals today. Today's entry is about counting our classroom food bank donations. We wrote Voici la nourriture and drew groups of 10 different food donations items.

We continued playing the fun math game SPLAT.  How many blue dots are under the splat to make the number in the box?

Reminders:

This Friday AM class - dress in winter / Christmas festive wear for caroling in the gym Friday morning.

All library books will be due Wednesday December 18th. Exchanges will continue after the winter break.

Wow, our kindergarten AM and PM classes collected a total of 170 food items! We sorted them into 3 large groups and counted all the items in groups of 10. We talked about all the ways we could sort the food into other different groups. Thank you for all your generous giving to the Food Bank!

During gym today, two ski/snowboard instructors came from C.O.P. to teach us about equipment that is used during skiing or snowboarding. We also practiced ski and snowboard movements in different centers around the gym.

We received a new plastic bag during library book exchange today to keep our books safe and undamaged in our backpacks. Please return your child's library book in their plastic bag every library book exchange day.

We started a new Gingerbread counting center today. We are practicing our French counting and number recognition during this fun game.

We started practicing a new song today called 'Quand le Père Noël'. This song has been added to the song section of our blog.

Reminder - We are still looking for volunteers to bring eggs and butter for the AM group for gingerbread baking day.

What a fun PJ Day!  Students really enjoyed our special reading event where they got to visit another classroom and hear stories with a new group of students.  In class, we played Splat!, and continued with our social thinking stories, focusing on feelings today.  We played a couple of fun games: Charades, where we had to guess feelings, and How Are you Peeling?, where the students had to answer questions about different cards we showed them.  Reminder that Monday is library book exchange.

Can you guess how we're feeling based on our faces and bodies?

Today we worked on making patterns that were more complex than ABAB, since we're so good at those ones now!  This will continue to be an area of growth in the new year.

The students also enjoyed our new math game Splat!, which is a fun way to work on subitizing, as well as beginning addition and subtraction thinking.  Ask your child how it worked!   To help your child with the concept of subitizing (recognizing at a glance), play dice games and ask your child to say the number of dots without counting.

Have you heard our new winter song yet?  It's up on the song page!

Reminder that tomorrow is a special whole school reading event and PJ Day!

The students were very excited today to discover that our dramatic play center had been turned into gingerbread houses!  We challenged the students to add more decorations to the gingerbread houses, so the art station was also very busy today.

Ask your child about our book today (Cours, petit bonhomme, cours).  They made some great predictions as to what they thought the ending would be, but were very surprised when it was completely different!

We continue to be amazed by the Food Bank donations.  The students are so proud of how much we've collected as a group and we can't wait to count them on Monday.

We played a fun game in gym rolling balls to knock down pins, and we wrote another journal entry.

We love observing the students during center time.  The blocks and building center is developing some very talented architects and engineers!

Reminders:  Friday is PJ day for the PM group, and tonight is the last opportunity for December Scholastic orders.  Thank you to everyone who continues to sign up on the volunteer page to send in contributions for our Dec. 19 activity.

Thank you to everyone who sent in food for our collection box.  The students were very excited to see how much we've collected in 1 day!

Today, we started journaling.  We talked about using a majuscule (capital letter) at the beginning, our fingers to make spaces, and a period at the end of a sentence (so that the reader knows when to stop!).  The students did a great job for their first time journaling!

We also had some fantastic discussions comparing what was the same and what was different between the two gingerbread books we've now read.  Ask your child about the book we read today (Gingerbread Baby)!

We introduced some new centers today: a writing center and two small world centers (one based around winter and one around the gingerbread stories).  The small world centers allow students to
re-enact stories we've read and build on their vocabulary skills.

The AM class also enjoyed reading with their gr. 3 buddies.

Today we started our book study of Le bonhomme en pain d'épices (The Gingerbread Man) by reading an original version.  We will be comparing different versions of this story over the next few weeks. We discussed what we thought the message of the story was.  We also looked at the images to determine what time of the year this version takes place in.

We continued with our throwing and catching skills through some fun games in P.E., and the PM class spent some time reading with their gr. 3 buddies today.








Both classes listened to the story Emma and the Food Bank.  We discussed what we could do to help others and have decided to have our own food bank box in the classroom.  We challenged everyone to bring in at least one item.  At the beginning of next week, we're going to count how many items we've collected and issue a challenge to the rest of the school so that we can fill up the big boxes by the gym!



Some important reminders:

1 - we still need some families to sign up to contribute to our gingerbread making activity at the end of the month (especially from the PM class). Thank you to those that have already signed up!

2 - to ensure we can still offer future extra events, please remember to pay your school activity fee (for example, Teacher's Pet that was in October).

3- Friday is PJ day for the afternoon group

Merci beaucoup!