A Glimpse Into Our Day

With so many families attending our Open House to view documentation, we puzzled over what to share for our October blog post.  Some months we post more often than once - it just depends!  We decided that it would be great to share a look at our daily schedule as of now complete with photos and examples.  We will share more details to enhance the photos that you may have seen already posted in our room.  Please note that not every child is always featured each time we post in our photos.  We celebrate the idea that families can still learn about what is happening in our classroom through other children in our kindergarten community.

Our schedule in September and October is very open.  We have large blocks of time for play so that we can really focus on building social skills, routines, problem solving, and foster relationships as we get to know your children.   The schedule will certainly look different in November and changes as the year goes on.

Sometimes we hear "all they do in kindergarten is play"!  Play is the work of children.  Children make connections and build pathways in their brains by connecting new knowledge to what they already know.  What is it that children know best?  Play!  Play in our programming is not a random free-for-all.  There are very specific skills we are looking for within play and when there are areas of the curriculum that we are not seeing uncovered by play, we provide new materials to get at these skills or we begin to focus on explicitly teaching these skills through small groups.  There is a great deal of intention behind all of the playful experiences provided in our classroom.

Outdoor Play

We begin our day with outdoor play!  We begin by singing a good morning song under our meeting tree and greeting each child as a group.  Sometimes we also do a circle sharing time at this point.  We spend a large amount of time first thing outdoors where children are able to use materials out of our kindergarten shed, explore gross motor opportunities on the climber, explore in small groups in the forest or valley, and use a great deal of math skills in the sandbox.  It is a wonderful opportunity for educators to be able to connect with each child in a welcoming and relaxed manner.  We do a great deal of assessing skills and documenting outdoors.

What skills do you see emerging in the photos above?  Math (measurement, sorting, counting, patterning)?  Movement?  Oral language development?  Social skills?  Dramatic play?  Art in nature?


Discovery Centres/Snack Choice

We bring small groups at a time in from outdoors (eventually into November, these groups will be used for small group instruction in math) and children can have a snack if they choose or move into discovery centres.  This part of the day allows for a great deal of choice:  which centre should I go go?  Should I have my snack?  There's no room at the snack table...what should I do?  Do I want to go inside yet?  Children learn to make decisions by making decisions - not by being instructed what to do.  Yes, of course, there are many times when we need to follow instructions but we provide a great deal of choice throughout the day to build these decision making skills.  It is, in fact, these skills of self-regulation that are a huge predictor of school success as children grow.

Recess


Quiet Reading/Quiet Writing
In the full-day kindergarten program, it is pivotal to provide valleys (quiet, less energy required, an opportunity for calm) in our day.  During this time, children can choose from a variety of materials for writing (whiteboards, books, paper, chalkboards, etc.) and can write for many purposes (cards, signs, books, lists, etc.) about things of meaning to them.  There are a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction books to explore as well.   The expectation of this is that children have quiet exploration for about ten minutes (the attention span of children is their age plus or minus about two minutes) but often children become so engaged during this time that it carries on longer.  It is important to note that just because written pages are not coming home does not mean your child isn't exploring literacy in the classroom.  Often we see explorations on whiteboards, using magnetic letters, writing in the sand outdoors, etc.  It is important that we celebrate all of these aspects of literacy and it is our goal to provide a variety of rich opportunities that are attached to meaningful experiences instead of closed-ended worksheets that get only at very surface level skills.

Discovery Time
Children then filter out to discovery centres.  Sometimes they are building on investigations from earlier in the morning and sometimes they are creating anew.  Educators take photos, write down quotes, keep track of skills that emerge for each child (measurement language at blocks, patterns at art, letter recognition when writing), support and scaffold the use of letters, sounds and numbers in play, model problem solving, ask deep questions to push the investigation further or to elicit language from the curriculum (e.g. Oh - I see you sorting those stones by size - tell me about that!), talk to each other about what we are seeing, and make notes of possible materials or a focus for the following day.

Music and Movement
We group together to explore movement - often through dance routines projected onto our screen.  Children explore following directions, positional and location language, patterns in movement, rhythm and beat, and dance and gross motor skills. Below is the link to one of our favourite dance routines.  Perhaps your child can show you at home!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=dttq7DutQC8

Read Aloud
The educators take turns reading a story aloud that has been chosen due to an interest arising in the classroom, an area of problem solving or social skill development that we want to explore, a quality we are working to foster (perseverance), exploring specialized vocabulary, etc.  We are looking for children to use their prediction and inferring skills through pictures, hearing stories as they make connections to their lives, assessing vocabulary and understanding, discussing sounds and letters in words, sharing with and listening to a partner, and so much more.



Lunch/Recess
We eat all together during this lunch time and encourage and model manners, decisions about healthy eating, and conversation between the children.

Yoga/Mindfulness
Here is the second valley within our day where we discuss and explore slowing our bodies down.  In the program we follow for yoga, there is a period for exploring movement and a couple of minutes at the end to lie quietly and relax.  Sometimes children choose to take more quiet time following the group yoga.

Discovery Centres
Depending on the day, we often give children a choice during this time to join us outdoors for a specific exploration (making letters from nature, collecting items to sort, etc.) or remaining inside for further exploration.  As we settle in to routines, sometimes we use pieces of our discovery time to support small group inquiry investigations about topics of interest.   We will also eventually be using a period of this time for working with a small group for explicit instruction within literacy.

Tidy
We put on one calm "warning song" so that children have a sense of how much longer they have to explore before we tidy.   We then put on the soothing tidy up song and support the children so that they are all lending a hand to tidy. 


Gathering
We then gather together to sing our goodbye song (traditions are incredibly important in creating our community), share anything that is needed for the following day and sometimes sing additional songs together.  Sometimes children are interested in sharing something with their classmates and we often use this time to do so before we get ready to go home.

We hope that sharing our schedule and our thinking behind this schedule is helpful to give a glimpse into our day.  We are eager to share more of our thinking and reasoning as it connects to the Ministry of Education's mandates for Full Day Kindergarten and as the year progresses through our blog.