Wonderful Winter in Kindergarten!

This February, we have been learning and celebrating love, and kindness! In the Seven Sacred Teachings, Piita (Eagle), teaches us the virtue of Love! Tough love!  With a goal of an empty nest! When eaglets are born, the adults co-parent and bring sticks down to create a soft cozy nest for their young. It is safe and comfortable having your fierce parents protect you, and having food brought to you daily. Eventually it is time to develop independence, leave the nest and learn to fly.  Cleverly, the parents start to bring rougher materials to the nest, making it less cozy and nudge the young to fly on their own. We are learning how to become more independent and been working on building lifelong skills that will help us navigate our own journey! 

We learned what it means to show love and kindness to ourselves, our friends, and our families! We have been participating in kindness challenges each week and created a kindness wall for all the random acts of kindness within our classroom community! We focused on exploring what it means to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Sometimes we don't know exactly how a person may be feeling because we haven't had the same experience, so it's important to always use kind words and open hearts with all our interactions!

We have been focusing on challenging ourselves to always do the right thing, make good choices, and learn how important it is to always tell the truth! We learned in the Seven Sacred Teachings, Sspopii (Turtle), teaches us the virtue of honesty! We practiced showing honesty and telling the truth, even when it's hard, in everyday challenges within the classroom! 

Numeracy 

We have been working hard on building our number sense up to 10! We have been learning how to recognize and represent numbers in a variety of ways! We have been representing numbers with counters, math manipulatives, pictures, and through movement! We have been learning to create fun patterns through movement! For example, stomp, stomp, clap! Students are working on constructing and deconstructing numbers up to 5 using fun games and a variety of math manipulatives! We also practiced sorting objects by colour, size, and shape. We even ordered ourselves in the classroom from shortest to tallest! 

Literacy

Students have shown incredible growth and success with recognizing letter names and the sounds they represent. They are working on using this knowledge to complete other tasks like reading word families such as 'at' and adding different letters at the beginning to create new words, such as, cat, rat, hat, etc. Students are making excellent progress with segmenting and blending the sounds they hear in words. This is our favourite song that helps us learn all the interesting sounds that letters make! Play it and ask your child to show you our actions! 

HOOP Dancing 

 

We are so lucky to have the wonderful Elder Shirley come in and teach us traditional hoop dancing! Her little furry friend Lemon came to watch us too! Lemon gave us special pictures to take home!

Thanks to Mr. Alex for taking us SNOWSHOEING! It was such a unique and fun experience to walk through the snow like our ancestors once did! 

Oki Everyone!

My name is Ms. Lindsay, and I am very fortunate to have joined the Niitsitapi family last year! I am very excited to be a part of your child’s Kindergarten journey and look forward to watching them learn and grow!  I was born and raised in a small town in Ontario, called Stirling! I moved to Calgary almost 7 years ago to pursue a career in teaching!  I have been teaching in Elementary Education over the last 6 years and absolutely love teaching children how to read and write!  A few years ago, I adopted a dog and named him Hudson, who I love to go on adventures with! On weekends, you will find us out in the mountains hiking, or at a dog park around the city! Here are pictures of my family below!  Edit