June Calendar for Area 3

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Team Three Artists

After observing the self-portraits painted by the artists on Team Three, Pam, a student Early Childhood Educator working with Area 6 and occasionally Area 3, wanted to change the materials available for the updated versions. She replaced the large paint brushes with medium- and small -sized brushes and added natural skin tones for artists to choose from. This activity met one of the specific expectations for visual arts in the Full-Day Early Learning – Kindergarten curriculum, namely, “explore a variety of tools, materials, and processes of their own choice to create visual art forms in familiar and new ways.

Pam worked with students one-on-one to discuss individual choices and it seemed like most artists were pleased with their updated paintings. To that end, the original portraits which had always been my favourite things in our room, have been covered by equally beautiful paintings created under the guidance of Pam, a most natural and talented educator. On behalf of Team Three I would like to thank both Pam and Su for sharing so many of their great ideas in the short time that they were with us. We wish you both nothing but the best in all of your future endeavours!

Making Ten

Christine Rowe Quinn, the math coach for our family of schools, worked with Areas 3 and 6, once a week for the whole month of April. With her help we learned all about the various ways we can make numbers 1 through 10.

We made dot plates to represent numbers to 10 in the configuration shown on dice. We also traced our hands and then cut them out to show how to make numbers to 10 using our fingers.

We also used 10 frames which look like 2 rows with 5 boxes each all joined together. Each frame holds only one counter and the frames are filled from left to right starting with the top row of 5 boxes. We used the 10 frames like flash cards to see if our mathematicians could recognize at a glance what number was represented on the 10 frame.

A trick for reading the 10 frame quickly is to use the upper row as a base of 5. So if the top row is filled then that represents the number 5 and the quickest way to recognize the number 4 is to see that one box on the top row doesn't have a counter or 1 less than 5.

Mathematicians noticed that the number 7 is represented by 5 counters on the top row and 2 more on the bottom row or they may have recognized 7 as being represented by the last 3 boxes in a 10 frame not having any counters or 3 less than 10.

Although many JK mathematicians recognize number symbols to 10 (6 and 9 being the main confusions), they often refer to the number board to see how to form these numbers and as an extra challenge, we also wrote out the words for numbers 1 to 10.

At the end of our unit mathematicians were asked to make a number train of 10 linking cubes using 2 different colours. We had a friend check our work and then we represented our number train using the same colours by drawing our number train on graph paper so that it matched the linking cubes we used and writing the corresponding numerals that together made 10.

After looking at everyone’s work we noticed that 10 and 0, 9 and 1, 8 and 2, 7 and 3, 6 and 4 and finally 5 and 5 all make the number 10!

Room to Read Book Drive

Members of The Me to We club, who have also run various initiatives such as the We Scare Away Hunger Food Drive and We Make Change, are now collecting gently used books for a book sale to raise funds for an organization called Room to Read.

The focus for Room to Read is to promote literacy and gender equality in education across Africa and Asia. Please access the link below for more information on Room to Read www.roomtoread.org

If you have any books that your children have outgrown and would like to donate them to the book drive, please have your child bring them to school and we will add them to the Room to Read boxes in every classroom.

After we have collected as many books as we can, we will hold a book sale during the lunch periods in the first or second week of June when students will be able to buy a book for $1 and all of the funds raised will support the Room to Read organization.

All donations are greatly appreciated and we thank you in advance for your generosity!

Scientist in the School

On Thursday May 15^th Scientist Natalie was our visiting scientist in school. She helped us understand that we are responsible for taking care of nature since we share the earth with all living things. As “environmental scientists” Team 3 discovered that our choices can help protect our environment including the air, water and soil.

Thanks to the many parent volunteers, students were able to rotate through several centres to learn why we need to protect the environment now and how we can go about doing that.

One of the centres, “I can reduce garbage”, had scientists consider the fact that garbage takes up space in landfill sights and that a litterless lunch is a choice that can reduce the garbage we produce. See if your child remembers how to be a friend of the earth by choosing a plastic or metal spoon, a sandwich bag or a sandwich container and a drink box/bag or a thermos?

Another center, “I can conserve water”, had scientists consider the importance of having clean water for all living things and that there are lots of ways that we can conserve our use of water. See if your child remembers what choices to make when brushing teeth or playing in the sprinkler in order to be a friend of the earth.

A third centre, “I can recycle”, had scientists consider how some things can be made into other products that can be re-used instead of being thrown out as garbage. See if your child can tell you about how red wiggler worms break down organic matter and produce castings that can be used as soil for planting.

The fourth centre, “I can care for nature”, had scientists consider the importance of plants and how trees produce oxygen as well as food and shelter for living things. We know that we use a lot of things that come from trees and that it takes a long time for a tree to grow so we need to plant new trees to replace the ones we use. Ask your child what s/he used to plant a sunflower.

Finally, at a fifth centre “I can care for my backyard”, scientists considered how they can care for the creatures in their yard. They made a little bird feeder (some showing a pattern) and learned to recognize common birds by playing a game using bingo cards with pictures of robins, cardinals, blue jays, chickadees etc. Hopefully you can feed the birds around your home using this specially made bird feeder.

Thank you again to the many parent volunteers who generously shared their time and talents. I was humbled to see what extraordinary educators you are teaching science and I am certain that this learning experience would not have been as rich or as much fun had it not been for your time and effort!

Below please find some related websites you may wish to explore include:
www.cathyscomposters.com – find out how to start your own worm composter
www.carbondiet.ca – tips and resources on “going green”

Melanie Walsh’s book 10 Things I Can Do To Help My World sums up much of what we learned from Scientist Natalie. Check it out the next time you visit the library!

School-wide Math Challenge

Ms. Hardy, our vice-principal and former math coach for our family of schools, presented a problem for all teachers to solve before giving it to their students. Together, during one of our staff meetings we had to work with a partner to show how we would go about solving the following problem:

It was interesting to see all of the different methods teachers chose to solve the problem and how similar we are to our students in terms of how we even approach such a challenge.

Since this was a school-wide math challenge, the mathematicians in JK began by reading stories that included farm animals (just in case some of us had never seen a pig or chicken) and then we took a look at the plastic pigs and chickens in our bin of farm animals.

We used these pig and chicken manipulatives to help us count the animals and legs but counting 52 legs was tricky for some and so we tried different combinations such as 4 animals and 10 legs, 6 animals and 16 legs, 8 animals and 20 legs, 10 animals and 26 legs, 12 animals and 30 legs, 14 animals and 36 legs and finally 16 animals and 42 legs.

When the focus became more about drawing pigs and chickens than on keeping track of the number of animals and counting legs, we tried pasting pictures of pigs and chickens onto a piece of paper and showing our work by crossing some out when we had too many and gluing on more when necessary. We tried as much as possible to show our work or to have our thinking recorded on our paper. Most mathematicians persevered until they were able to find a solution to some version of the problem but for some it was tricky to keep track of both a certain number of animals in addition to a specified number of legs.

In the end it was fun to challenge ourselves as mathematicians especially for those with older siblings working on the same math problem! Hopefully Ms. Hardy will have more school-wide math challenges for us to solve in the future so that we can continue to get ideas and learn from each other.

May Calendar for Area 3

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Dewson Dance-a-Thon

On Friday, April 25^th our Kindergarten dancers, along with the rest of the students at Dewson, got to show off their moves at the annual dance-a-thon. This much anticipated event is both fun and a great source of physical activity plus it has the added benefit of being one of the major fund raising events for our school.

Even our youngest students were an impressive group in that they knew the lyrics to so many popular songs and had the moves to match such current and cool tunes! Although it was difficult to take photos in the darkened gym, everyone had on their glow bracelets and many remembered to wear white so that they would glow under the special lights.

Thank you to all of the friends and family members who sponsored our dancers. The money raised goes towards funding our Visiting Artist program, Scientists in School and so many other enriching opportunities for our students.

April Calendar for Area 3

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Visiting Artist Liliana Rodriguez

Thanks to the support of the Ontario Arts Council as well as the generous funding from the Dewson parent council, Kindergarten classes were given four days during this entire school year to work with visiting artist Liliana Rodriguez.

Liliana is a Colombian-born, Toronto-based artist. She has a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Hunter College in New York City, as well as a teaching degree. Liliana has received awards from the Toronto Arts Council and the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. She has led workshops for TDSB elementary schools for the past six years and developed art programming for the City of Toronto Parks and Recreation. Liliana has over twelve years of experience teaching creative arts to children and is also a former Dewson parent.

Liliana’s theme for this year’s project involved an exploration of shapes. After having students trace all of the triangles they could find in a copy of Lawren Harris’s Icebergs, Davis Strait, 1930, students used pre-cut triangles to form their own landscapes and then sprayed their picture with yellow food colouring. The cut triangles were then carefully lifted revealing triangles in the negative space. The cut out triangles were then arranged in a different configuration and the whole page was sprayed again with blue food colouring. Students saw how yellow and blue make green and when the cut out triangles were removed and then positioned for a third time followed by a spraying of red food colouring, they saw how blue and red make purple.

Liliana then shared a wonderful book entitled Museum Shapes by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The intent of this book was to have students recognize 10 different geometric shapes as depicted in famous works of art. It was fun to find the shapes in such beautiful and interesting paintings and to see some of the works of art owned by the museum.

Liliana then had students use small, medium and large circles to create a figure. With the abundance of snow this winter and a great many stories about snow read to them, many of Team 3’s artists chose to make snow people. Students painted over their pictures with a silk screen and then transferred the circles they had taped on to another sheet so that they would have a stencilling effect.

For Liliana’s final print making project, students were shown five basic types of lines including, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, zigzag and squiggly lines. The artists then chose one type of line and etched it several times on a piece of Styrofoam in order to create a pattern. This printed pattern will then be painted over and stamped on a piece of paper as a starting point to create animal shapes.

We are so grateful to Liliana for teaching us about shapes, patterns and lines as well as for all of the opportunities to practise print making. More than one student commented on what a nice teacher Liliana is when told that she would be the teacher for the day when I had to be away for various literacy and numeracy workshops. Thank you so much Liliana!