Good afternoon,
This week, we spent time thinking about one of the most important parts of being a class community — our friendships, and the behaviours that help us make and keep friends. The children enjoyed exploring a variety of stories and nonfiction books about friendship and sharing what they noticed. They were particularly interested in a short film that clearly illustrated how kindness can be passed on — showing how one kind act can inspire another. As a class, we agreed that good friends help each other, play together, share, and show care for one another. When sorting pictures that showed different social situations, the children were quick to spot which ones showed friendly choices and which showed ‘not good choices,’ explaining their thinking clearly. Later in the week, they looked at pictures of children interacting and suggested what the children might be saying to one another, focusing on how to use kind words and be caring and helpful. The children’s thoughtful ideas were written down by the teacher as speech bubbles and sent home for families to see.
This week in literacy, the children explored a Big Book version of the song The Wheels on the Bus to learn more about how books and print work. Together, we looked for the title, author, and illustrator, and discussed where to begin reading on a page. The children enjoyed helping to find pictures and words on each page and counting the words in a familiar sentence from the story — “The horn on the bus goes beep, beep, beep.” We noticed how there are spaces between words and used our fingers to count how many there were. The children then worked together with me to rebuild the same sentence using word cards, putting the words back in order to make sense. During small group time, they also completed a Word vs. Picture Sort, where they sorted cards into two groups — words and pictures — and then, together with me, matched each word with its corresponding picture.
In mathematics, we continued to focus on accurately counting sets of objects through games, songs, and stories. This week, we also had fun creating human graphs to show which foods class members like best. The activity was followed by an opportunity for the children to complete tally graphs. Each child chose one of three ready-prepared tally charts -favourite cake, favourite ice cream, or favourite fruit- and then moved around the classroom asking friends and teachers about their favourites before recording the results on their tally sheet. You can see photographs of the children enjoying this learning below.
Wishing everyone a good weekend,
The KG1 Team
