J also happens to be for Junior Kindergarten (the half-day, every other day program for four-year-olds), Jack and The Beanstock (we're working through a unit on fairy tales) and Jewellery (the Kinders are highly observant and always notice if their teachers are wearing rings, earrings or necklaces).
Student teaching has finally arrived and the first two weeks have flown by! I've taken the plunge into the land of Kindergarten and fallen in love with all of it - all the busyness, all the questions, all the discovery and all the learning that happens every minute of every day. It helps that I have a marvellous co-operating teacher who goes by the name of Devon Caldwell and just so happens to be the author of the blog Kindergarten Diva. We have two Kindergarten classes at OLCS - the JKs who are four and the SKs who are five and come every other day, all day.
So far both classes have been working on fairy tales which included making graphs on whether or not we'd kiss a frog if it would turn into a prince (most kids answered yes they would!), deciding on criteria of what makes a fairy tale and reading different versions of fairy tales. To work on our 2D shapes outcome, each student built a castle using construction paper shapes. As a group, we cut out all of the shapes and talked about the properties of each one.As an assessment tool, I interviewed each child and asked them how many triangles, rectangles, squares and circles they had used to build their castle. I was very impressed with their creativity and knowledge of 2D shapes!
