With summer just around the corner, this month will be packed full of fun and interesting learning opportunities and many will take place outdoors! Hopefully sunscreen and hats will be in order. Program Information Thanks parents for coming to the Celebration of Learning and for helping support the Read-at-Home and spelling programs now underway. Children who make the most progress are the ones who have parents and caring adults who support their learning at school. Our Gabriolan children are lucky to have so much support from home! This month, we will continue learning with an additional emphasis placed on mathematics, health and science. Language skills will continue to be integrated with math, science and health studies. Theme Digest May’s learning theme will continue to focus on the life cycles of frogs, butterflies and plants. As you may have heard we plan to have seeds, and caterpillars living and growing in our classroom along with the tadpoles. These living things will live out their full life cycle for us to see. We will be releasing the adult butterflies into the garden at the end of our study. The tadpoles (when they develop into frogs), will be returned to my neighbor’s pond on Gabriola Island. We will also incorporate a story writing unit into this topic and the children will write their own stories about frogs, tadpoles, bugs, butterflies, plants etc. Birthday Broadcast There are no May birthdays. We will be celebrating three birthdays next month. One June Birthday and 2 summer birthdays, this way no one misses out. Show and Tell Bulletin For show and tell in May we will continue with the nature box. The children are to bring “things from nature” to show us and tell us about. Each child will have an assigned show and tell day and a small nature box will come home with them the day before their show and tell day. You can start helping your child think of something to bring for this special show and tell. You will know it is your child’s turn when the nature box comes home with him/her from school. Please be sure to send the box back the next day as another child will be anxiously awaiting his/her turn. Gym Journal We have completed a floor hockey unit with help from Hunter’s dad. THANKS Jeff! We then worked on our Frisbee skills and traditional circle games like London Bridge is Falling Down, Farmer in the Dell and Do You Know the Muffin Man? Much of our PE time will be outdoors from now until the end of June. We are planning some indoor Yoga time as well. Social Skills Synopsis Our social skills focus this month will be on making good learning choices and staying on task. Field Trip Quarter We had a fantastic time on our trip to Mad Rona’s for hot chocolate. Many big smiles and such polite manners! I am sure we would be welcomed there again. Our next trip will be on May 24. We will revisit the Gabriola museum with a focus on how we shape the local environment and how the environment shapes us, including key events and developments in the local community and in the local First people’s communities. We will spend time outdoors looking at the petroglyphs and studying native plants and uses. Joan Merrifield will guide us through this process. Special Guests We had a special guest artist teach us how to do contour drawings and the children were fully engaged in this for two full hours. Baby Oliver came for his second visit with his mom and we noticed some amazing changes in him! Gardening at the Commons We helped Sacha do some weeding in the gardens last week and we will continue to help out in the garden each Thursday after lunch. Please be sure your child is dressed for gardening on Thursdays. Feel free to send gardening gloves for your child if they have a pair. Make sure they are labelled with your child’s name. Nature Walk to the Pond Each Friday afternoon we continue to go on our nature walks and last Friday we had an exciting development! We actually saw Gizmo the turtle sunning on the bank of the pond. Jeff identified the turtle as a Red Eared Slider (not native to Gabriola). We also spotted goldfish. This is perhaps the pond of misfit pets? However we did find a mystery egg and a deer crossed our path on the way back to school. Such excitement! Celebration of Learning Thanks again for attending this event with your child. I was impressed with the goal setting that the children did with you. It will give them each a new focus for their learning and help us get ready for the next grade. If you took home the white sheet with the Quick-Scale snapshot of your child’s learning progress, please return it to me at school. I will update these documents again in May and send the final copy home for you in June. This way you can look for the progress your child has made since February. Read at home program Thank you for your support of the read-at-home program so far. The children are very excited about this. Please make every effort to continue to read daily with your child. The calendar must be returned at the end of the month for your child to be entered into a free book draw. You will find a new calendar and note in your child’s back and forth folder for May and June. Please be sure to send the classroom book back daily. We need the books to stay in circulation daily, thanks. Watch for the books that the children will be making at school, these can be read for read at home and then kept at home to be read again and again. I enjoy working with you and your child. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me or leave me a note in the back and forth folder or planner. Sincerely yours, Mrs. Kathy L. Gurr
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AuthorI am a teacher with over 25 years of teaching experience including all grades from kindergarten to grade seven. I am a Primary Specialist with a diverse educational background in Individualization, Learning Support, Behaviour Support and Home-Learning Support. Archives
May 2017
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