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
Our team has previously shared how we document children’s learning with tools like Seesaw and Google Forms. However, the tool we’re sharing in this post is about what we document with regards to noticing and naming the learning. It’s a compilation of “I can” statements in the form of Learning Goals in Kindergarten which correlates to the 2016… Read More Documenting with Learning Goals in Kindergarten
Let’s begin with a story. A year 2(senior kindergarten) student enters the outdoor classroom on the first day of school with his mom smiling quietly behind him. His first words are, “Look Mrs Max. I found a worm in my peach pit at breakfast. I wonder why he’s in there?” Some might think, he didn’t… Read More Creating a Culture of Curiosity in Kindergarten
Before transforming our yard into our outdoor learning playspace, our early years team shared our hopes and dreams for the children in the space. We wanted it to provide opportunities for children to develop curiosity, exploration, creativity, innovation, resilience, problem-solving skills, risk-taking, collaboration, oral language skills, mathematical understanding, and connect with nature. We also kept… Read More Planning Outdoor Learning Playspaces For All Seasons
As I continue to learn from and with my early learners, I find myself increasingly curious as to why children are often innately drawn to types of learning that they would benefit from. For years now my early years team has observed children with lower language abilities drawn to language rich activities like small world… Read More Creating Meaningful Small World Play that Supports Language Development
Wondering/Driving Question: I wonder what the worm is doing in the peach pit? James(JS) One morning JS found a worm in his peach pit when mom was cutting into it at home. JS wanted to bring it into school to “investigate it and figure out what it was doing in there”. JS’s mom and he… Read More James and the Giant Wormy Peach: A Kinderland Inquiry
The weather is warming up and the littles are so very excited to get out our portable water wall. The water wall provides amazing opportunity for open-ended exploration and problem-solving using real-life materials. Since Problem-Solving and Innovation play a significant role in Ontario’s new Kindergarten Curriculum as one of the four frames, experiences like a exploring a waterfall provide a… Read More Water Wall: Designing and Documenting
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
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
inspired by play 