Today we gathered our food donations together and packed them up for delivery to the food bank. Thank-you so much for your generosity! Many area families will have a much better holiday because of it! Back at the beginning of the month when this food drive was launched, we talked a lot about how truly fortunate we are and how we could help make life better for others. The kids were particularly distressed to think that babies might go hungry, and I think that is why we had so much baby food donated! Thanks again everyone, I hope that you and your family enjoy all of life's blessings, yet let us all be mindful of those who do not.
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Listening skills are very important in all areas of learning, even in science where you must be able to make accurate observations. The plastic eggs have different materials inside them. These students are trying to match eggs containing the same materials by shaking them to hear what kind of sound is produced. As part of our exploration of sound, you may have noticed that we have different noise-producing materials attached to the fence outside! Recesses have been quite noisy lately! An important phonemic awareness skill is the ability to hear the different parts (syllables) in words. There are quite a few activities which help develop this skill, but pictured below is one that the kiddos especially enjoy. They are hopping the frog puppet across the lilypads, one hop for each syllable in the word. The lilypad which they end on tells them how many syllables the word has! For example, if the word is 'elephant' they hop once for 'el', again for 'e', and a third time for 'phant', ending on the #3 lilypad. Boys love to build, but how to encourage them to do something other than make zombies and transformers? (Don't get me wrong, that's all well and good - but EVERY DAY?) This activity was a hit today. We had these little guys very interested in replicating the pictures using our blocks. I'm going to use the same idea with a variety of our building toys and hopefully the interest will continue!
I am very proud and pleased to say that our little ones were very quiet, respectful and well behaved during our Remembrance Day ceremony this morning, even if they look a little animated here as we prepared to leave our classroom to go down to the gym. You can visit the school's website (there's a direct link to it off the 'Parents' page on the kindergarten site) to see more pictures.
As Remembrance Day approaches, we have been talking a lot about some very big and abstract ideas here at school. We have been reading and discussing the story of "Bad Penny", a Lancaster bomber piloted during the Second World War by Windsor native Bob Upton. "Bad Penny" was the first allied bomber to fly over Nazi occupied Holland to drop food to the country's starving people in a mission called "Operation Manna". A student in Mrs. Dario's class even made a model of the plane during play time. The tall tower on top of it is the food it is carrying to help the starving Dutch people! This ties in nicely to our school's food drive. The "We Care We Can" food drive will run for the month of November, and already we have received donations. Thank-you! We have watched short video clips of historic wartime footage, as well as the music video "A Pittance of Time", to discuss the important contribution and sacrifice our veterans and current military personnel have made to protect us and our freedoms. But how to make the connection in these very young minds? Today we talked about PEACE. You can't hold it in your hand or see it with your eyes - it's a very abstract word! So we talked a lot about what PEACE is today and these are some of the ideas the little ones came up with. I'm pretty happy with them and I hope that you are too! We were so thrilled to have Bennett visit our classroom today! Mrs. Mac is running a program to help our students develop empathy and understanding, and Mrs. Keen graciously allows her little guy to be a part of it! Check the photo gallery on the site for more images.
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About Mrs. C.Mrs. Cuckovic, or "Mrs. C." as she's called, is a retired educator who spent a long and varied career with the Greater Essex County District School Board in Windsor, Ontario. Archives
November 2020
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