The natural beauty of autumn leaves and fall harvests continue to impact our early learners as we explore, create, and imagine outdoors in our forest and school garden. As a way to integrate children’s fascinations with all that comes with autumn our team has co-created some intentional learning explorations that also connect to our student’s developing… Read More Autumn Play and Learning Invitations
This past year we’ve challenged ourselves to thinking about how kindergarten prep coverage can be responsive to student learning and well-being with considerations like the flow of the day, interests and inquiries, documentation, and the Ontario Kindergarten Curriculum. Our prep teacher coverage was assigned phys-ed for 40 minutes everyday and an extra 40 minutes at… Read More Responsive Prep Teacher in Kindergarten
It’s exciting to reflect on the year gone by not only to support forward thinking for the new year, but also to appreciate precious moments and memories. My Top Nine Photos on Instagram of 2017. Handle: meljmaxwell Spatial Reasoning Provocation A clear plastic table cloth with Sharpie paint pen shapes drawn on it invites children… Read More Best Nine Photos of 2017 on Instagram
Since the new Ontario Kindergarten Curriculum was released this summer our kindergarten team has spent some quality time reflecting and re-thinking how we document and organize this documentation with regards to the four frames. We’ve narrowed our scope of documentation to 4 main documentation formats and we’re sharing templates for you to use, tweak, improve upon, and share… Read More Documenting with the Four Frames
We believe that building a culture of transparency connects us to our community in a powerful way that demonstrates our commitment to our earliest learners. In our ongoing effort to be transparent our early years team has created a philosophy display for families, visitors, and fellow educators to review. Through newsletters, Seesaw (documentation app), Twitter, Facebook,… Read More Making Our Philosophy of Learning Visible
Our youngest learners have spent many hours playing with this woodland forest small world play sensory tray. What’s more than natural materials and loose parts for open-ended play lies an opportunity to think more deeply about literacy and numeracy. Naturally, adults would see this provocation as an invitation for children to share stories with lots of oral language… Read More Woodland Forest Small World Play (Math and Literacy embedded in Play)
It’s not just another classroom with neutral colours, stones, and baskets. We live in Muskoka and our environment as the third teacher reflects our culture of living and how we encourage children to care for our forests. We spend lots of time exploring forests using a forest-school type approach: playing with bugs, building dens, and inquiring about… Read More A Reggio-Inspired Classroom Design – Kinderland Tour Part 2
This playful open-ended provocation has various natural loose parts and colourful Easter items that begs to be played with. These intentional materials were chosen to encourage math play, specifically numeracy and measurement. We like putting dots on some of our loose parts as well as numerals as it encourages subtilizing, but what’s more, even if a… Read More Easter Math Play
Have you tried infusing math into your small world play? We love wood cookies and have many in our room and outdoors. Some are numbered, some have dots, others have letters or words on them. Constant exposure to numbers, letters and sight words in small world play is such a simple and easy way to… Read More Small World Zoo
Subtraction Leap Frog Materials: Construction paper leaves with 3 numbers on each. Game Players Dice: We created our own dice with wooden cubes from the dollar store. Modifications: We’ve played this game several ways. 1. Math the Number: Roll the die and if that number is on the next lily pad then you get to… Read More 3 Playful Subtraction Games
inspired by play 