Sharing, Tennis and Graphing

We had a crazy, mixed up day today.  But it was a lot of fun!

Here's a look at our "L" sharing...

ladles

a girl and her brother, both with "L" names

limes

lemon

level and Lego

she told us about her friend with an "L" name

Lego

he told us about his friend with an "L" name

love

 

a GREAT book that we read for story time today

lollipops

leaf

lion

light

lightsaber

Today we had our first tennis lesson!

Here is a very unfortunate picture of our tennis instructor, Marcus.  He looks terribly mean in this photo, but he's not at all, he's a lot of fun and taught us so much about tennis today.

Here we are listening and laughing as Marcus explains the rules.

Here's how we stand while we wait to start

here we are, "shaking hands" with our rackets

Learning how to do a "super 8" (weaving the ball around our legs with the racket)

I can't remember what this is called (maybe "around the world") where we try to move the ball around the perimeter of the racket without letting it fall.....tricky!

Then we played a game where we pretended the balls were eggs and we tried to walk from the wall to the net while balancing our egg on our frying pan without cracking (dropping) our egg.  If we were successful, we picked up another "egg" and tried to balance two, then three etc.  Fun!

This was called "trampoline ball" where we bounced the ball on the strings of the racket and tried to catch the ball.

I can't remember the name of this one either, but we tried to bounce the ball and then bump it up in the air with our racket.

Then finally, Marcus turned us into chickens (the kids on one side of the net) and turkeys (the kids on the other side and we worked on throwing the ball over the net.  He taught us to point to the sky with our other hand and throw the ball over hand over the net.

Our next tennis lesson is on Friday this week.

Today we started something new at calendar time.  We answered the question of the day and built a graph with our responses.  We also learned about initials and last names.  Each person placed his/her initial card onto the graph to answer the question.  Today's question was "which colour do you like best?"  Then we spend some time interpreting the results.  This is something we will continue with different questions every time.  

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

It was so nice to see all of the smiling faces this morning.  It sounds like everyone had a really nice break, I heard ALL about it!  

We had a pretty low key day today.  We had lots of time to talk and reconnect with each other.  We started talking and learning about animals in winter.  We did some journal writing/drawing and we got outside for some time in the gorgeous (but cold) sunny day.  

Here we are working on our journals.  I am encouraging the kids to add details that show information in their pictures, using colours that make sense.  I am also challenging the kids to think about a word that they would like to write and to listen to the sounds that they hear in that word and try to print the corresponding letter(s).  You'll also notice, in the pictures below, that we have new table groups.  

We also have a new friend in our classroom.  We are so happy to have him in our class.  Many of the kids in the class were excited to help our new friend learn classroom routines.  

Tomorrow is L sharing day.  Please help your child find an item to bring from home that begins with the letter L.  

We will also have our first tennis lesson tomorrow.  Please send running shoes.