We recognized Pink Shirt Day this week, emphasizing kindness and friendship. We really enjoyed the song “Kindness” by Juicebox Jukebox, read many wonderful stories about kindness and talked about the many ways in which we can show kindness to our friends, families, neighbours and ourselves.
 
The kids worked making a paper friendship chain. It was a true task in teamwork and allowing others to go ahead of themselves as there were only two ends of the chain. It was also a good activity for stretching their fine motor skill. I heard many wonderful interactions between the kids as they worked to be patient and help each other thread and glue paper strips together.
 
Everyone worked on painting a Friendship painting and also journaled about kindness ie: drawing a picture of someone being helped up by another after they had fallen.
 
Our week long project: The Kindness Quilt, started with the kids brainstorming the ways in which we can be kind to one another and then turned into each child truly owning a few of the “kindness” acts by recognizing and when others have shown certain kindness’. The kids chose a few of the talked about acts of kindness and, as a team, the kids helped to sound out and write them on a paper quilt square. After this, they hole punched their quilt squares to later be sewn together with yarn.
 
Our letters this week were S and G. We have also been working on “at” words, as the kids have shown through their rhyming ability and eagerness to know how to spell words that they are ready to learn a few word families. We had fun using “at” words in our creative storytelling. The kids sure came up with some funny stories! The also did a great job identifying “at” word images.

We learned all about turtles this week; that they are reptiles, have been around since the time of the dinosaurs, they lay eggs on the beach under the sand where they then hatch and have to make their way to the ocean, they have flippers instead of legs like a tortoise, and how many species of turtles are endangered.
 
The kids did a turtle walk, based on the story we read called “Turtle Walk” by Matt Phelan, trying to keep their 'shells' on their backs. We used oil pastels to draw sea turtles and then covered the paper with watercolour paints to make the sea. We also made 3D turtles by gently bending and gluing strips of paper over the shell of their 2D turtles.
 
We sure took advantage of the warming weather this week! The kids almost couldn’t believe that we could actually go outdoors every day. We went bum sliding, rolled down the hill, built pretend campfires, explored the ravine and climbed hills. Boy are we excited to go on adventures and have picnics when the snow melts!
 
Our letters this week were O and Q. We learned that O is a vowel; it makes it’s sound and says its name. We have been learning a bit about vowels in the past couple of weeks and the kids are doing a great job remembering what being a vowel means and have begun to be able to identify them in words. We had a fun time taking vowels out of our names and realizing vowels make words/names sound a lot nicer. We also continue to work on syllables.
 
A couple other things we did this week were spelling our names with wooden letters and making patterns out of large beads and then threading them.

Happy Valentine’s Day!
 
What a cute day of love and friendship we had on Friday! The kids were so excited to hand out their little Valentines and equally as excited to receive Valentines from their friends, no matter how big or small. Watching this exchange was the sweetest. Although, Bella dog did not think it very fair, even though she was in the centre of the circle, that she did not receive Valentines like the kids did. She was lucky enough to have a card with her name on it. J
 
We worked with oil pastels to make heart balloon drawings and made heart family portraits with little hearts they cut out to use for the faces of their family members. The also made a cute envelope made out of a folded-up paper heart and wrote “I LOVE YOU” inside to give as a gift to parents. They did a great job cutting out the heart and writing the letters!
 
We worked on letter identification, uppercase and lowercase letter matching, and matching letters with images that begin with each letter. Everyone is really picking up on these letter sounds and matching the uppercase and lowercase letters! The love to make patterns and are really good at it, so they practiced making up any kind of pattern with a variety of heart shapes. Patterns were based on size, colour, and even texture of the cute-out edges of the hearts.
 
Ours letters this week were U and C. The kids used stickers to make the letters and traced and wrote the letters in their workbooks.