Apples, Apples, One, Two, Three

So our class just finished the Apples unit and moving onto Pumpkins! During this unit we had a field trip to Apple Barn, Abbotsford. Although it was a long way out from Vancouver, it was definitely worth it. There were multiple schools there, but everything was very organized and to keep kids occupied they had a playground, a mini "zip-line," 1-floor high slides, and the most amazing jumping pillow (basically it was like a jumping castle, but with no top). The actual tour itself consists of tasting apples, learning about an old fashion apple sorter, going to the petting farm, learning about the life cycle of apples and pumpkins, going on a hayride, and actually picking a pumpkin from the patch. 

As I was wrapping up the apples unit, I put together a booklet for each child of what he or she learned/did for the past couple of weeks. 

Clockwise from top: colour of their favourite apple (after an apple tasting at school), using their eyes to observe what the apple looks like on the outside and the inside, the four seasons of the apple tree, counting how many apples were un-painted, different combinations of 5 apples in a barrel, life cycle of an apple (pictures were cut out, then glued and organized on the life cycle chart), and the cover with a concrete poem of an apple.

September & October

Our first bulletin board - on the second day of school. I love it how our school has a Cricut!

Practicing my teacher's writing.

Our Fall discovery table. We later added more leaves,
acorns and students brought in chestnuts!

Bare tree.

We added leaves.

And MORE leaves.

Trying to tie in 1:1 correspondence and our apple theme.

KWL

Got students to write letters of their names in these squares and then glued on square letters. Great for 1:1 correspondence and the concept of more than/less than when comparing each other's names

Angry turkey  for Thanksgiving.

A more friendly one:).

Me

Why Blogging?

So I am a student teacher at a school in Vancouver, BC. My teacher and I just did parent conferences in a lecture style using the SmartBoard - which we just got earlier this year. This gave the parents a chance to see what its like to use this new system. The feedbacks were incredible. Parents were amazed at what technology could do to enhance our Kindergarten classroom. Hence, I decided to create a blog to challenge myself to be more "tech-y" because that is where the future is heading. Yes, I know blogging has been around for a while, but I didn't realize its importance until I started looking up resources for lessons and seeing how many teachers have blogs to share their resources and experiences. The main purpose of this blog would be for me to share my passion (but lack of experience) in both teaching and art. 


About Me


I am Ms. Lai and I wanted to be a teacher ever since I was five years old. Maybe it was because of my awesome grade one, two, and three teacher Mrs. Barker. She was always so patient with all her students and I could feel that she really cared and loved each one of us. By the time I was in grade six and seven, I spent most of my lunch hours volunteering in a kindergarten class or in another primary class. I started teaching Sunday School at church when I was 16. For the past six years, I have also been working in a summer camp setting. With awesome co-workers to learn from, all six of these years taught me a lot - 4 of those co-workers are/were also in the teacher education program. Now I am doing the two-year elementary education program in UBC. I have an awesome sponsor teacher, who has lots of experience in teaching Kindergarten and especially in early literacy. 


Arts and crafts is another one of my passions, but I would definitely not say I am good at it. I love coming up with different art projects for my Sunday School, summer camp, and school kids to do. I especially like it because art (especially in primary) can be tied in to any subject in school.


I hope one day to become a Kindergarten teacher, who encourages students to take risks and assure them that they will make mistakes and it's okay. My sponsor teacher shared this quote with me: "if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." I, too, love this quote, and hope to use it to motivate myself to keep striving in teaching and in art.


PS. Please comment, critique, suggest...etc :) Thanks!