Hello parents,
We are beginning to use Twitter as a way to communicate what's going on in the class to our parents. We will be doing two to three tweets a week! This blog page will remain as it is with our Twitter feed on the page, which means that you can always come here to see our latest tweets. If you would like a more convenient notice of the Tweets, please click on one of the Tweets below and "follow me". You will need a Twitter account to do so. Otherwise, keep checking back here for the latest at Edgemont School. Hello kinder-families! Thank you to everyone who came out to our parent teacher interviews this week. As a kindergarten team, we believe it is very important to come together as student, teacher, and family to have conversations about the learner profile of your student. During the interview, your child’s teacher showed you a copy of their EYE assessment, also known as the Early Years Assessment. If you have any questions about assessment in kindergarten, you can go click here and you’ll be taken to the early learning page for assessment from the Calgary Board of Education website. Please ask your child’s teacher if you have any questions! Over the month of October and beginning of November we have been exploring the changes of fall. As classes, we collected artifacts and materials from the nature that surrounds our school. Our kindergarten students put on their scientist hats and looked at seeds, pinecones, leaves, flowers, insects, rocks, and so much more. We used magnifying glasses and bug boxes to get a closer look at our items. Students chose items and practiced drawing scientific illustrations. We then explored the changes of fall. Ask your child about what changes in the fall. What colours do we see in fall? Pumpkins became the most exciting and engaging part of our inquiry. Our pumpkins were explored from the outside in. Can you child tell you where the ribs and the stem of a pumpkin are located? What about the fibrous strands, pulp and seeds? Students were able to learn about the life cycle of a pumpkin from seed all the way to a full-grown orange pumpkin! Click here to watch the video about how pumpkins are grown on a pumpkin farm As a kinder-team our next step is to begin exploring the season of winter. Ask your student about the changes of winter, ways to describe the weather, what to wear to be prepared, the animals you can see in the winter, and about our winter song and poem! Click here to see our song and poem to practice with your child at home. The ‘five little snowman’ song is set to the tune of ‘five little pumpkins’. Welcome to our Kindergarten blog! Thanks for your patience as we finally have it up and running. We will be updating this blog biweekly and will be sharing about what we have been doing in the classroom. The past weeks have been busy as we transitioned into our Kindergarten classroom. We have been making new friends, familiarizing ourselves with routines and exploring the different centers in our room. Ask me what animal group I belong to! In our first days of school we have taken up our school wide inquiry “ways of knowing” by looking at “knowing myself” and “knowing our space”. “I Know Myself” We began by practicing to recognize our name. After reading the book “Chrysanthemum”, a story about the importance of a name, students were introduced to their attendance rock and created their rainbow hook tags. With practice everyday, students are becoming more independent in finding their rock and their hook. Along with name recognition, students were given the opportunity to draw a self portrait. We read the story “I Like Myself” and students discussed what they liked about themselves. After a discussion and example about using shapes for body parts, students drew what they believed they looked like. Using Sharpies, students were encouraged to carefully plan their picture prior to drawing. Following the drawing, students played with watercolours and painted a wash over their portraits. Following we read the story “Dot” about a girl’s undiscovered artistic talent. We created our own dot and added the initial letter in our name to accompany our portraits. We will continue to explore “I know myself” by looking at the meaning of our names and our interests. “I Know My Space” Students participated in a scavenger hunt around the classroom. Students were given photo clues to find certain spaces in the class. We had fun becoming more familiar with our classroom space and are now more independent with class routines. We will continue to explore and learn to care for our space by visiting the learning commons, music room, gym, staff room, office and Panorama room. Ask your child if they recognize these spaces! Thank you for sending your child to school with a healthy snack for their growing bodies. We ask that you do not send juice boxes to school as they typically don’t get finished and can get messy when spilled. Instead, please send your child with a water bottle as they can drink it throughout the day. Thank you your support! Subscribe today: Don’t miss out on school messages
To parents/guardians who have not yet subscribed online, We routinely send out messages via email. If you have not subscribed, then you will not receive any notifications. These include messages on topics such as school fees, field trip costs, picture days and fun lunches, which are considered commercial under Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). You will still receive other types of messages that are not considered commercial, such as student absence notifications. To subscribe, go to www.cbe.ab.ca/subscribe and enter your primary email address. Your primary email address is the email where you currently receive school messages and that you use to log into My CBE Account, if applicable. From the Calgary Board of Education and our schools. Dear Parents of our Kindergarten Students:
We would like to welcome you to Edgemont School and look forward to working with you and your child(ren) in the upcoming school year. We know that you will have many questions and have tried to anticipate many of them here so that you can make your own plans for June and September. Registration Registration will begin on Monday January 9, 2017, at 8:30am in the Panorama Room in Edgemont Community Centre (attached to Edgemont School). Welcome to Kindergarten: An Information Meeting for Parents & Kindergarten Children: We will hold information meetings after school and in the early evening on Thursday, June 1st, 2017. Please set aside the date and we will provide more information about times by the end of April. A.M. or P.M. Class Placement: At Edgemont School we offer half day Kindergarten classes and parents may express a preference for either the AM or PM program. The academic content of both programs is the same. The process for determining who attends which program is as follows:
School Fees & Bus Transportation: Fees are determined by the CBE Board of Trustees in the spring of each year and we encourage all families to set up an online CBE account in order to pay the fees. Transportation is offered to those families who live beyond the walk limit. There is a transportation fee for this service and forms need to be completed in June. We will provide all the details on setting up an online CBE account and bus registration at “Welcome to Kindergarten.” School Calendar: We operate on the CBE traditional calendar which can be accessed at http://cbe.ab.ca/registration/calendars/Pages/default.aspx. Please look on the right hand side for the tentative 2017-2018 calendar. We will personalize this calendar for Edgemont School by adding 3 additional professional days and will post a copy of the final calendar on our website in June. School Hours: Kindergarten students receive approximately 475 hours of instruction. Each year we adjust our school hours depending on the number of school days there are during the year. We anticipate that our morning classes will run from approximately 9:00 to 11:40 and our afternoon class will run from approximately12:50 to 3:30. Homeroom Teachers: We staff our school in June and August. Parents and children will learn who the Kindergarten classroom teachers will be on the day before school starts. Students will be assigned a specific classroom teacher by the end of the first week of school. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): We have attached the questions which parents most often ask so that you can review them now (under the Resources button in the upper right corner of this webpage). If you have further questions that you hope to have answers for would you please add them to the google doc link so that we can attend to them during Welcome to Kindergarten or in a future communication: Kindergarten Questions from Parents. We have added important resources on the buttons on the top right. Please click the link to see. We look forward to meeting with you and answering more questions at Welcome to Kindergarten. The Staff of Edgemont School |
Edgemont SchoolSharon Hanwell, Principal Important DatesSept 29 PM Kinder
Terry Fox Run Oct 6 AM Kinder Oct 9 Thanksgiving Day Oct 13 PM Kinder Oct 16 Non Instruction Day Oct 20 AM Kinder Oct 27 PM Kinder Archives
September 2017
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