Mentors Sharing Messages

We met with Grade 1 mentors today who shared anti-bullying messages of kindness and support through the language of sculpture. 

It's always meaningful to visit another classroom and see what other children in our school are doing!

Making Connections with Mentor Texts

In Peyer Reynold's book 'Ish' the character Ramon gets discouraged and stops drawing after his brother teases him about his artwork. 

We asked the children to consider what we've been discussing about positive growth mindset this week and offer some words of advice for Ramon. Here's what they shared. 

Ten Frame Foods!

Using a large ten frame to organize and add together all the food drive donations that arrived at school today!

8 altogether! Thank you for supporting our school-wide food drive! Donations are still being accepted until December 11!

Primary Colour Bubble Prints

The children were invited to explore printmaking and colour mixing today using bubble wrap and the three primary colours of paint. 

Children painted the textured side of the bubble wrap and made prints on their papers by stamping over and over. 

Beautiful new colours and designs appeared like magic!

Chocolate Play Dough

Chef hats make everything more fun including chocolate scented play dough!

Mentor Texts

We have read these books at circle to help us learn about positive growth mindset in action. We compared the texts today and made text-to-text connections. Why don't you ask your child to tell you about these stories tonight?

Generating Wordles with Grade 8 Technology Buddies

Wordles are 'word clouds' and are a great way to capture a lot of information on a subject in an aesthetic way. Today we met with the Grade 8 class to do some partnered technology work. Each kindergarten child shared what he or she loved about school and their Grade 8 buddy used this information to generate a personalized wordle. The Grade 8 prompted the kindergarten child by asking thoughtful questions about school in order to promote reflection and rich oral language.

Here are a few examples of the completed Wordles. It was amazing to review these with the children and see what they loved about school! Copies will be coming home shortly - why don't you consider engaging your child is a discussion about how they created the Wordle and what their favourite parts of school are?

 

Scholastic Book Order

Families, please send all Scholastic Book orders in by Friday, November 27. If you would like us to contact you when they arrive (in the event they are a holiday gift for your little one) please let us know. Thanks!

Positive Growth Mindset

On Friday's PD day I had the pleasure of attending a meeting that discussed the importance of cultivating a positive growth mindset in children. We want children to develop resiliency and grit and realize that if they have a positive attitude and work hard, they can accomplish anything!

Today we used two mentor texts to help us see positive growth mindset in action. 

In The Most Magnificent Thing we meet a girl who works and works until she creates the most magnificent thing. She perseveres through failure and failure until her creation is perfect. 

In The Day My Mom Came to Kindergarten we meet a group of children who help a mom learn what to do at school after she makes mistake after mistake. The children show understanding in helping the mom learn about and practise all the different activities at school. "I'm proud of how hard you tried today mom!", the little girl acknowledges effort over natural ability helping the mom know that with a positive attitude and practise she can learn anything. 

We also showed and discussed the following inspirational video with the children. Please consider watching it together with your child and maybe sharing something that you've worked hard to learn and do in your life.

 

We also had a circle time discussion about things we've personally learned to do with practise.

 

We are hoping that our discussions regarding positive growth mindset will continue and become even more enriched as we read more books and discuss what this means in our own individual and collective context. We encourage any family member who is interested in discussing how a positive growth mindset helped them succeed at something to contact us. We'd love to host you!