September 3

 Hello everyone!

We have had a busy first week of school. We completed a sharing circle each morning. Yesterday we shared our favourite animals. Today we shared our favourite thing about the first week of school, as well as something we didn't like so that we could talk about how to fix any problems that came up. 

Each day we filled in our classroom calendar and sang some counting songs to practice counting up to 100. 

Yesterday we also got our printing books. We talked about how we are going to learn how to print each letter correctly, and learn about the sounds each letter makes. It's our first step in learning how to read! For now, we practiced how to use our printing books by trying out something called "pre-printing shapes." Those are shapes that you need to practice in order to print neat and tidy letters. We each got a sticker for our hard work!

We started a self-portrait project of us wearing our masks with our bright smiles hiding underneath! So far, we folded our papers to create the right shape, and drew the top half of our faces. We can't wait to show you our finished portraits!

We've been practicing our quiet reading time each day. We learned that we can look through the pictures to help us learn about the story, we can search for and count how many of a certain letter we can find. This will get us practicing reading readiness skills (e.g. following the direction of print, noticing the difference between letters, words, and sentences, etc.). We also used a noise meter to practice different sound levels in our classroom and when we would use a whisper voice verses a loud speaking voice. Our whisper voices are important during reading time so that we don't distract each other! Ms. Byrne was so impressed with our quiet reading time that she took a class picture of us working hard on our reading:

Today we worked on ordering numbers 1-10 while practicing our cutting and gluing skills. We got a paper with ducks numbered 1-10, but they were all mixed up! We had to cut out the ducks and put them in a row in the correct order. Once Ms. Byrne records how we did with this task we will be able to bring our ducks home to show you!

Have a wonderful long weekend!

- Ms. Byrne