Weekly Wrap Up -> Sept. 4-7

I survived Week 1 in Kindergarten!

Although this is my 14th year teaching, all in Kindergarten, there is one thing that doesn't change each year...I'm still BEAT by the end of the first week!

It certainly was busy but we had a great start to the year as the children enjoyed exploring the room and getting to know one another. We sang a lot of songs to know each other's names, played co-operative games inside and out, and my favourite - I partnered the Year 2 students with the Year 1 students to act as mentors and assist them with working at centres.

If you read my post from last week, you will know that I made a new goal for myself this year. I am planning to post my weekly plans here for other teachers to get ideas and for parents to know exactly what we are doing each day.

You can download (and even edit!) these plans here.

This week was all about routines right from Day 1! We spend a lot of time reviewing with the children how to handle the materials (we use the phrase "gentle hands"), clean up, share, and transition to other areas of the school.

They each receive a special "golden bag" on the first day which they will take to and from school/home daily.

You can find the editable labels for these here.

Here's a closer look at what we worked on:

Sunflower Provocation

I didn't realize how many children would be interested in the sunflowers this week! The RECE that I work with, Mrs. Petrone, collected these from her mother's garden. And look at what we found inside...seeds!

They were very curious about the seeds and wondered how many they collected.

I think for next week we will ask the children how they can find out the number of seeds they picked out.

Provocations

We set out a few provocations for this week. We didn't have very many as we keep things very simple and easy as we focus on handling the materials with care and cleaning up after ourselves. I like to keep things open ended and see what the children know (or if they have any interest in something).

*NEW*

I've had a lot of messages about downloading these ABC mats - I posted about them last year also - but I'll leave the link again if you'd like a copy.

First Day of School Crown

Each year our students make a crown to celebrate their first day of school. They are all so eager to decorate them and wear them, all day long!

Roll and Stack

We worked with our Year 2 (SK) students in small groups playing this math game. They rolled the dot die, counted that many cubes and used them to build a tower to match the number on their mat. During September we spend the first couple of weeks on number sense - working with numbers to 5 and 10.