Cherry Blossoms

As cherry trees are bursting with pink and white blooms all over the city, the kindergarten students created their own cherry blossom paintings.  To add a fluffy texture to our paintings, we used cotton balls, held by clothespins, to paint the cherry blossoms.

First, we painted our backgrounds and trees.

Then, we used cotton balls to add the cherry blossoms.  We used darker pink colors first, and then used the lighter pinks on top. Some students chose to add white cherry blossoms as well.

Come see our hallway bulletin board!

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RULER and the Importance of Emotions

The RULER program has become an integral part of our social and emotional learning.  As we are always trying to find better ways to help our children solve conflicts, we hope that teaching these skills can help them to better understand and manage their emotions.  This is what RULER stands for:

Since the beginning of the school year, we have been discussing feelings and emotion words. Students are learning how to label their emotions.  As a class, we voted on the words that we felt were important to us.  They were able to narrow them down to three words that they felt were most important to them.

Using these three words, we created our classroom charter.  Our statement reads:

“We want to feel safe, peaceful, and included.”

Students also drew pictures about their feeling words.  Here are three examples.

 

In conflict situations, I often relate back to our classroom charter. If someone forgets to clean up a mess on the floor, I would ask if this was a “safe” thing to do.  Students would say that someone could slip on the mess, fall and hurt themselves.

By increasing our students’ social skills and emotional intelligence, we can build a classroom culture that encourages positive relationships.  For more information on RULER, here is their website:  http://ei.yale.edu/ruler/

Feb 28th Pink Shirt Day

On February 28th, we encourage everyone to wear pink.  By wearing pink, we are promoting kindness and friendship, and standing up to bullying.  The original story behind Pink Shirt Day can be found here:  The Pink Shirt Day story

The kindergarten students created their own pink shirts!

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We Can Measure

We have been learning how to measure linear objects.  After measuring books, toys and other objects around the classroom, the students decided that they wanted to measure a student.  They chose one larger unit and one smaller unit.  Soon, they discovered that it took a lot longer to measure him using the smaller unit (e.g. the snappy cubes).  Reflecting on the problem, many students decided it was best to use larger units to measure larger items.  The student we measured is 61 snappy cubes long, or 8 markers long.

Valentine’s Day

This week, we celebrated Valentine’s Day!  It was a wonderful opportunity to talk about kindness and generosity.  Many students brought treats and cards to share.

Many students dressed up for Formal Day and got their photos taken.  At lunch, there was a school-wide dance party!

The day before, we baked cookies! We rolled out the cookie dough and cut out shapes using cookie cutters – hearts, circles, ovals, and lips!  And baked them in the oven.

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We baked over 50 cookies and shared them with the staff.

On Valentine’s Day, we decorated our cookies with icing and different coloured sprinkles.

In the afternoon, we had a hoot creating our owl treat bags!

These bags were full of treats by the end of the day.