Safe & Unsafe Touches

Today Mr. John came to our classroom to begin talking with us about child protection. He began by introducing us to what a 'safe touch' is. We learned that safe touches are wanted and make us feel good. They make us smile. Touches such as handshakes, high fives, pats on the back or wanted hugs from loved ones can all be safe touches. Next week we will continue learning more about this with Mr. John and will examine unsafe touches a little more.

In the meantime, please sit down with your child and take a look at the paper he/she is bringing home today. You can fill out the backside together. This does not need to be returned to school; rather, it's an opportunity to open dialogue at home.

 

New Unit of Inquiry!

We have just begun a new unit of inquiry in kindergarten, and throughout the weeks ahead we will be exploring what it means to be human through the Primary Years Program (PYP) transdisciplinary theme "Who We Are".

The central idea for this unit is "We explore the world with our bodies". We will be looking at how our bodies help us learn and discover new things, and the senses will play a large role in our learning.

As a provocation to heighten interest in our new unit and encourage questioning and thought, a number of items were placed throughout the room. The only direction we were given was to explore the items.

After spending time closely examining the items, we gathered together and used words to explain what we noticed. These words were charted so we all could see:

 

The next day we revisited our words and looked at pictures of ourselves exploring the items on the table. We used our mathematical knowledge of sorting to put them into groups that made sense. At this time we were given no knowledge or explanation of the basic five senses, but we naturally grouped them that way:

Our end product resulted in this:

We will be using this as a stepping stone into the senses and how we use our bodies to explore the world. As we continue on our journey through this unit we will begin labeling these groups with the sense that each group depicts and which body part(s) we use with each sense. We will keep you posted on our ongoing discoveries and inquiries!

Meskel

Yesterday was Meskel in Ethiopia, and we learned about and celebrated this holiday in school on Friday. We began our day by attending a play put on by all third grade classes. They taught us the history behind Meskel and we learned a bit about Ethiopia's history. Their singing and acting was quite impressive. I have added several videos to the link below, so if you missed the performance please take a moment to view them!

Kindergarten followed the play by celebrating with our own coffee ceremony, put on by our very own KG teaching assistants. We enjoyed popcorn, bread, and the aromas of coffee and incense. We also enjoyed traditional music and learned some Ethiopian dance moves.

After our coffee ceremony we joined the whole school for the lighting of the demera, which commemorates the legend of Queen Helena and the finding of the true cross. This celebration was a wonderful way to learn more about our host country and provided a rich cultural experience for us all. Please take some time to go through the following pictures with your child.

Meskel Celebration Photos

Come View Our Photos!

If you are here tomorrow for the Meskel celebration, take a moment as school is let out to look at the photos outside our classroom. We finally got them hung up and you'll love reading our interviews!

Meskel Reminders

Tomorrow we will be celebrating Meskel at ICS. Please help us do so by:

• Encouraging your child to wear traditional Ethiopian clothing, or white/light colors
• Bring a water bottle and hat to take with us for the demera lighting

Parents: Remember that you are welcome to join us for the ceremony on the upper basketball courts just behind our classroom. You are also invited for a coffee ceremony in the morning. You should have already received information from ICS regarding this. Please also follow the instructions sent by ICS in regard to pick up of your children. Dismissal is early tomorrow.

We are looking forward to a wonderful, traditional celebration of our host country tomorrow!

Publishing Party!

Another exciting experience from last week involved taking action in regard to our line of inquiry "We celebrate literacy". We did this by celebrating ourselves and the amazing authors we have become. Class 5B students graciously welcomed us into their class and listened as we shared our stories. They were wonderful mentors as they provided feedback about our work. We listened to their positive words and their suggestions as to how we could make our stories better. We reflected upon their ideas after returning to our classroom, and some of us have already started implementing their suggestions. Thanks again fifth graders for celebrating with us. We can't wait to celebrate YOU as authors sometime soon as well!

~ take a closer look at our celebration ~

Also take a few minutes to watch some of feedback and encouragement the fifth graders gave to us. Don't miss the smiles on our faces when our books are shared!

Yana the Author from Kacey Molloy on Vimeo.

 

Lyla the Author from Kacey Molloy on Vimeo.

Field Trip

Last week we had the wonderful opportunity of visiting Central Printing Press.

This visit provided the opportunity to see how books, magazines and brochures are published. We are 'publishing' all kinds of books in our classroom, and having the opportunity to see an official publishing company was quite the experience. We were amazed to see the many machines and people that work to make the things we see on our shelves everyday. If your child hasn't already told you all about this experience, please encourage him/her to do so! You can take your child on a "walk through the pictures" so that he/she can describe things of interest. Take a look:

To view all field trip photos, visit our Flickr album

We took some time to reflect on this experience the following day. We noted what we saw, what we learned, and what our favorite part of the field trip was. Take a moment to look and listen to one example:

Starting the Day Off Right

We have added a new element to our morning routine in KG-B, which involves being mindful and finding balance. We have been using the amazing resource "GoNoodle" in our classroom from day one as we find we need to get up and move or need to refocus. This week we began to use this website to help us calm our bodies and minds and get ready for the day. Through the use of short one to two minute videos, we have begun to learn how we can change our mindset.

Today during our morning greeting we went around the circle saying the chant, "Hey, hey (name), how are you doing today?", and we noticed that many responses included the vocabulary 'sad, angry, or tired'. We realized we had come to school with a lot of strong emotions. It was quite serendipitous that the video "Find Joy" was already queued as our mindfulness video of the day. You would have been amazed to see the seriousness with which we approached our video, and then at the transformation that happened after taking this one minute to reflect. So many more smiles were present after opening our eyes, and the room was filled with quiet chatters of "I feel better" and "Now I feel happy". To take a look at this video and others, click here.  

Taking this moment even further, Anastasia quickly jumped up after the video and grabbed the learner profile poster for "balanced" off the wall. She excitedly exclaimed, "We were doing this!!" What a wonderful, authentic introduction to this word.

Patterns & iPads

We are just beginning our exploration into patterns and we began by exploring our natural world. We learned that a pattern is when something repeats, and we were amazed to see that our world is full of patterns!

Our iPads are becoming our good friends in helping us document our learning. We used them today to take pictures of all the patterns we saw around school. We will come back to these photos over and over again throughout our pattern journey. This lesson was double fold as not only did our hunt involve pattern identification, but it also provided us the opportunity to practice taking quality photos with the iPads. This is important for us as we will be documenting our learning a lot throughout the year through the use of the iPads. In being able to do this independently we will be better able to make choices and take ownership of what learning experiences we would like to document and put into our portfolios. It also allows us to be able to share our learning with a wider audience. As the year progresses we will learn apps that can help us capture our thinking as we reflect on our learning.

Created with flickr slideshow.

Be Courageous

Last week we attended our first assembly. We joined first grade in celebrating our accomplishments and spent time closely examining the learner profile trait 'courageous'. ICS has written songs for each of these traits, and we sang "Be Courageous" together during this first gathering of the year. Take a moment and enjoy our singing!

(I apologize for the very poor quality of the videos. We had some technical difficulties!)

Be Courageous from Kacey Molloy on Vimeo.

Also take a moment to enjoy our school song. ICS truly is our home away from home!

ICS School Song from Kacey Molloy on Vimeo.

Important Notes

Important Notes

Dismissal:

Beginning Tuesday we will have a slightly different dismissal routine. This is to help with the congestion and confusion the school is experiencing after school in the pick-up area. 

You will find our class on the basketball court in the same general place, but your child has a job to do before heading home.  S/he will be wearing a clothespin attached to her/his shirt or jacket. Instead of simply waving goodbye as has been done until now, s/he must come give the clothespin to myself or Wintana when the responsible party has arrived to take her/him home. If your child leaves without returning the clothespin, we will be calling to ensure s/he is with the appropriate person and not lost. As always, all children must be picked up on the basketball court and not at the classroom or along our route. The only exception to this will be if it is a very rainy day, and in that case an announcement will be made school-wide asking that children be picked up in their classrooms. Please remember that dismissal is at 3:20 daily, except Wednesdays when early release happens at 2:00. Please ensure you are on time to pick up your child.

**Additionally, please send me an email as soon as you are able with a comprehensive list of adults with whom your child is allowed to go home.**

Field Trip:

Your child came home today with a permission slip to join the class on a field trip to a printing press next Thursday. Our current unit of inquiry is about sharing ideas through literacy, so the purpose of this field trip is to provide students with an opportunity to see the “behind the scenes” of publishing and printing. Please sign the form and ask your child to bring it back to school as soon as possible.

No School Monday:

Eid falls on Monday, so please note the change on your calendar as we will have no school Monday, but will on Tuesday. On Tuesday we will be on rotation 1. Eid Mubarak to all those celebrating!

September Calendar

Your child should have come home today with a calendar showing this month's specials rotation. I apologize as I made an error and forgot to include Library each Monday. Please take a moment to write that into your calendar so that you can help your child remember to return his/her books that day. In case you would like to print another copy containing the corrections, you can do so by clicking here.

**It is possible that days may be adjusted due to Eid; if that happens I will post an updated version.