We're underway with all our classes laying the groundwork for an unhurried year full of active learning.
In Kindergarten the focus during these early weeks is learning (and often relearning) the daily routines. While the Senior Kindergarten students have reacquainted themselves with their classmates, the JK students are busy exploring their Kindergarten environment and the fabulous toys and materials available to create with. 
All students are socializing with their new peers and adapting to being part of a group, including practicing those good listening skills and remembering to respect individual space.
The staggered start this year for our Junior Kindergarten program was very successful, gradually introducing our youngest students to a full day JK program and the energy levels required. Each child has dictated a story to accompany a painting they've completed and their self portraits are posted around the Kindie room. Handwriting Without Tears has been introduced and the students are working on simple fine motor practice activities.
Tidy up time is the perfect opportunity to toss in a little classification and sorting as the students sort their toys before putting them away. The class has been reading lots of great stories and experienced their first crosstalk, working out the guidelines for a class discussion and exploring the Habits Of Mind — the first two being Managing Impulsivity and Taking Responsible Risks.
In Senior Kindergarten, the students have spotted their own shadows and are intrigued to know more about shadows and light. They have traced their silhouettes, created shadow puppets and experimented making shapes with their hands. Introductions to the concept of a journal have begun and the students are contributing writing and illustrations. 
Handwriting Without Tears is also underway with the class working on their lower case letters. Language period is 45 minutes each week and consists of phonics charades, something the students love to play.
In Math the kids are counting and working with numbers from 1 - 20. Monthly paintings are up and the students are writing stories to accompany them with some teacher assistance sounding out the words.
Both grades have been up to the Computer Lab with Pam, getting onto the computers to familiarize themselves with the Mabin computer environment. Learning how to log on, developing mouse skills, printing and exploring Kid Pix are the focus.
Our Grade 1's are very excited about the pet turtles in their classroom, Big Brave and Dash, and ready to take on the responsibility of caring for them along with their fish. The class has been doing lots of chatting during Turtle Talk Time, observing the two reptiles, learning turtle anatomy and sharing their wonderings about the creatures. The students created a venn diagram recording the differences and similarities they noted about the two turtles before deciding to weigh them—a perfect opportunity to study more about weight and better understand the concept of grams. 
As part of their CSI studies, the students are also planting seeds to observe and nurture, recording the growth progress in their Science journals.
Building independence is a focus in Grade 1 and the students are already feeling comfortable reading the daily schedule on the board and getting started on the five morning activities: word study, quiet reading, math, journal writing, and printing using Handwriting Without Tears.
In Math, the children have been working on a variety of curriculum strands including data management and probability, measurement and number sense and numeration. They have been working on the concept of sorting, collecting data to find out more about their classmates and then displaying it in a bar or picture graph. The children are also learning about probability by tossing a die and recording their findings.
In Language, the students have been thinking about the letters of the alphabet by identifying which letters look the same in both upper and lower case, which ones have curved and straight lines and which ones have both. They challenged one another to come up with words that begin with the same sound and end the with the same sound. They are pumped about the classroom Borrow-A-Book system and are busy discovering new books to read. They have created a class list of strategies to use when trying to identify unknown words and another list of strategies they can use for journal writing when they don't know how to spell a word. Using a dictionary is just one of those strategies and they are learning more about how to find words in alphabetical order.
The class is discussing friendship in Social Studies—how to be a friend and develop good conflict resolution skills. Part of this is learning to listen to their peers, not easy in any grade, but our 1's are trying their best to appreciate the other side of a story and come up with good solutions to problems.
Our annual Meet n' Greet BBQ is a highlight for our students and school community, but asks a lot of our neighbours who graciously tolerate the raucous fun for one evening. To show their appreciation and community spirit, our Grade 2's took it upon themselves to contribute to the letters sent by the school to the neighbours. The class held a long discussion about why we might want to notify the neighbours about our BBQ and recorded their reasons ("The neighbours might want to watch TV and it'll be too loud", "It's a polite thing to do"). 
The students then needed to find out more about our neighbours, leading to to some intensive mapping work. The students located The Mabin School on a map of the area and then began to chart the neighbourhood homes, counting and sorting the neighbours into three distinct regions. The students then decorated 80 letters and made 80 envelopes, addressing each of them by hand before delivering them all. While out on delivery duty, the students took particular interest in the addresses of each home, documenting the house numbers for their records. The students then recorded the house numbers of their own homes and using these, created and solved their own math problems based on these numbers, which included a study of place value from the 1's to the 1000's. To top it off, a parent brought in a wasp's nest for the class to observe, igniting a greater interest in homes. Now the students are writing and illustrating their first books—concertina books on different homes for people, animals and things.
In other Math, the students have been involved in graphing and data analysis. They've created Venn diagrams and block graphs to display and compare their summer activities and an emerging interest in playgrounds, inspired by their recent visit to Dufferin Grove Park, has them collecting data on play spaces so they can do a comparative playground study.
The Grade 2's are also "ur" detectives, looking for "ur" words in their reading and compiling a giant classroom list. This began when they noticed the days of week, Thursday and Saturday, had "ur" in them. What else, they wondered? They are reading Mr. Popper's Penguins which has introduced Antarctica and a study of the other continents of the world.
Persistence and Taking A Responsible Risk are valuable Habits Of Mind and the Grade 2's cultivated them both when they were challenged to create a self portrait and write their name beside it using only paper and no scissors. What began with comments of, "Oh, that's impossible," became a fun and challenging activity. The students persisted and became expert "tearers." The unique portraits now decorate the classroom and the students all agree, if you practice something and stick with it, it gets easier.
