TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 8TH

I am amazed at how well our students have adapted to school.    Watching your children making friends, happily moving through their day with grace, fills my heart with joy.   I feel they already understand the meaning of Community.  Where as the teachers are struggling to deal with fitting in all the cleaning and safety protocols on top of trying to get our blogs out as you can tell as this is already a day late.  Thank you all for your patience while we go through a learning curve.

During our morning meeting we discussed our three school rules:  WELCOME, SAFETY AND RESPECT.  We focused on safety today.  Talking about why we wear masks

Ren:"Because of the virus"

What does safety mean?

Max: "You don't get hurt."

Ren:"To be careful."

Eli: If there's a fire, you don't get smoke in your mouth when you duck.

I showed students where to put a  book when you have finished reading it, and the best way for us to wash our hands.  

 A lot of the materials in the room are on a weekly rotation.   We also have a  manipulatives that can be sanitized in the dishwasher.  Until it is repaired we will continue to sanitize with a bleach solution by hand.  Leaving them to dry for 2 days before reusing.  Fortunately we have lots of manipulatives to rotate.

I also did an example of how to wash hands before making a work choice and the option of using hand sanitizer or washing hands in between different work choices.  Now, I know some of you will be thinking what is a work choice.   When a child decides which area of the room they want to play, such as dress up, small blocks or board games, these are all workchoices.

Ms Wahl, our P.E. teacher visited today.  She enjoyed spending  time talking and playing with the class during work choices.  We will have our first lesson on Thursday in the gym.  

This week we are introducing art materials. Today we introduced glue bottles.  Each child has their own glue bottle.  Learning how to squeeze out, "Just a spot, not a lot".  We created collages using mostly natural materials, and a few colored pom poms made there way into the selection.  Who doesn't love pom poms.

At the end of the morning we read Those Mean Nasty Dirty Downright Disgusting but Invisible Germs.  It tells the story of a little girl called Rosie who find out she can stay safe by washing a nd drying her hands thoroughly. The Illustrator used their imagination to draw what they thought different types of germs would look like.

Do you remember what shape the headache germ is?

What does Starfish mean?  

What color group are you?

Do you remember any of your friends names?

Who do you say hello to on the computer during morning meeting?

WEDNESDAY 9TH SEPTEMBER

Today we talked about  RESPECT during our morning meeting.

What does it mean when you are respectful?

Ren: "Be a good listener."

I introduced Saving cards, which allows them to save their work until the end of the day.  When we see the card on a work choice we know to leave it alone,  which is another way we show  respect for our friends.

Ramps were a theme this morning during workchoice time.  We used a variety of ramps to find ways  to make different materials move along the ramp.  

Those friends that didn't get a chance to make a collage yesterday completed one today.

This class loves to learn how to play new games.  This one is called Q-bitz Jr. As well as being fun to play it develops pattern matching and spatial reasoning skills.

We have observed how independently our class plays during the day.  The example below highlights the type of skills we are seeing.

Farrah noticed she had a hole in the knee of her pants, and shared with me her solution for dealing with the problem.  She took a piece of paper and drew a large circle with a blue marker.  After coloring it in she cut it out, and decided to tape it over the hole.  Great idea!  She was flexible when it didn't meet her expectation and decided to not worry about it, moving on to another work choice.  WOW! 

With all this work you have to take time to have a snack.  Each child sits on a socially distanced yoga mat which is cleaned once they finish.  

We read My name is Elizabeth.    It is a book I like to use to help further our discussion about Respect.  The story is about a little girl who loves her name.  Family and friends don't use her name until she stands up and clearly uses her voice to tell people she wants to be called Elizabeth.

To end our morning we played outside.

Are Elizabeth's family and friends respectful?

How do you use your Saving card?

What ways do we show respect for each other in the classroom?

See you in the morning