Weekly Message: Oct. 1st

Oki AM Kindergarten families,

During our short week, we thought deeply about caring for each other. We started the week by reading You Hold Me Up, by Indigenous author, Monique Grey Smith. We talked about how there are many ways of knowing and learning and that we learn with many First Nations ways of knowing including our Circle of Courage and Land Based thinking.

We briefly touched on the roots of the "orange shirt" of Orange Shirt Day and Phyllis Webstad's story of her residential school experience. This story treads lightly on such a deep and difficult history, focusing on the importance of family and respecting each person's right to be who they are.

Thinking of all the people that matter, while filling our orange heart.

We also learned about land acknowledgements and practiced one taught by the Calgary Public Library. It can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-z-CJwNa4w

The CBE short describing the word "indigenous" in an easy to understand way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CISeEFTsgDA

Art:

We used lines and shapes with sharpies and pastels on watercolour paper to create beautiful leaves for our Art Card Project. In this project, we revisited slanted lines, straight lines and curvy lines. When finishing our piece with water colour paints, we discovered that pastels resist water paints, so that our pastel lines showed through the paint! The children did a great job experimenting with colour.

Exploring water colours.

Literacy:

This week we focused on the letter Mm. We learned that Mm says /m/, which is a continuous sound (one that can be stretched out), found at the beginning of mouse or mop.

We also introduced our first "heart word": the. A heart word is a word that has letters that make "not learned yet" or irregular sounds. Our UFLI literacy program starts teaching these words early, as there are many high-frequency words that do not make predictable sounds.

When practicing the heart word: "the". Talk about it and describe it. ex. It has three letters. We use this word a lot! It starts with Tt but it does not say /t/ like tiger. The "e" on the end makes the schwa sound /uh/. Practice printing it out, following the formation guide (top to bottom and left to right). I have introduced the concept of /th/ briefly during our sound wall formation. I say that when t and h are together they get silly and stick their tongues out, because when you make that sound [like in thumb], your tongue sticks out of your teeth. (The /th/ sound isn't formally taught until grade 1.)

This Thursday, I sent home our "At Home Literacy Folder". Please keep this folder at home and use it to store our literacy practice materials I send home. It is important that children continually practice our focus letters so that they can begin to use them fluently. Please put your Aa, Mm and "the" practice sheets inside it. Thanks!!!

Gym:

We are enjoying our beautiful fall weather practicing soccer skills! We have worked on stopping the ball with our feet and kicking with the inside edge of our foot.