October 24 -28, 2022

Happy Diwali to our friends celebrating the festival of lights this week. 

Thanks to our families that came out to join us at our Monster Mash Halloween school event. It was so much fun to be together, see the different costumes, and dance in the gym. Thanks again to our Parent Council for hosting such a fun event. If you didn't get a chance to join, don't worry, we will be having lots of Halloween fun on Monday October 31, 2022 as a class. Students can look forward to a school-wide costume parade, Halloween themed morning academic tasks, community scavenger hunt and finishing our pumpkin learning we started this week. Students are welcome to dress-up. I recommend packing a change of clothes in the event they don't want to wear their costume all day. If you would prefer your student engage in alternative learning, please let me know and arrangements will be made.

This week, due to the addition of two more classes at EMJ, our gym and music schedules have changed days and times. As much as we try to be flexible, changes to our daily routine can be challenging to understand. This week we took it slow and focused on the new changes paying special attention to our daily visual schedule.

In literacy, we focused on the story 5 Little Pumpkins and learned about the use of speech bubbles. We read a few different versions of the story and also listened to a song. Here is a link to the 5 Little Pumpkins song, can you spot the speech bubbles? https://youtu.be/cm1qvX1ygOo  This week we also finished going through all the letters in the alphabet, focusing on identifying the capital and lower case letter. Starting next week we will be introducing the students to a classroom sound wall. We look forward to sharing more about this with you in our future blog posts. 

This week we started learning about Pumpkins. Students started creating their first repeating pattern book called Colourful Pumpkins, we will be working next week to complete all the colourful pumpkins.

During our inquiry, students have been learning about the lifecycle of a pumpkin. Check out this weeks learning song, https://youtu.be/tU-GwFHQZI8. Students participated in labeling the different stages of the lifecycle. We are looking forward to learning about what is inside the pumpkin and turning our classroom pumpkin into a Jack-o-lantern on Monday! 

On Monday, weather permitting, we will be going on our first community walk. Community walks are an important part of our functional living skills learning outcomes. During walks, we focus on street safety and recognizing common things in communities. Our first walk will be about 10minutes from the school to view a house that is decorated for Halloween and participate in a Halloween Scavenger Hunt. During this time our ratio will be 4 adults to 8 students. Please reach out if you have any questions or concerns about community walks. 

Upcoming Dates

• October 31 - School Halloween "Parade" (8:30 am)
• Students will have a chance to see each other's costumes
• November 1 - School Retakes (morning only)
• November 2 - Kindergarten to Grade 2 AHS Dental Screenings
• November 6 - Daylight Savings
• November 11 - Remembrance Day (school closed)
• November 17 - Fall Showcase (show starts at 6pm)