Happy Halloween Everyone!

It has been quite a busy day.  After the parade in the gym, the students were working on their haunted house pictures.  We had to cut it short so we could practice our spelling words for the week.  We then went to our Learning Buddies to do a Halloween craft.  Unfortunately, the students ran out of time.  They will continue to work on this craft tomorrow.  We then had our party in the afternoon, where the students had snack and watched the movie Monsters University.  The movie goes perfect with our class pumpkin as it is a character from the movie. I hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween night!

Today the students worked on a Halloween poem.  Ask your child what the similarities and differences are between pumpkins and Jack O' Lanterns.  We will also be writing about our field trip in our Writer's Workshop this week. In Math, the students are working on different addition strategies. They have been anchoring numbers to 10 by using the 10 frame and using the words less than or more than.  For example, 3 is 7 less than 10.  They have also been using the addition strategy counting on in which they take one number and count on from there.  If you have the number 6 and 9, you would start on 9 and count 6 more.  We also read the book The Empty Pot by Demi, which was supposed to be followed by a reader's response about character traits found in characters.  We however, ran out of time, so we will continue with this concept tomorrow. During Social Studies, the grade one students created new friends by tracing a classmate, cutting it out, and decorating it.  We will be labeling these new friends with the different parts of the body.  The grade two students are working on the different properties of matter: gas, liquid, and solid.

The students worked on a Halloween poem today.  They had to read the poem to six different people before drawing a picture and answering questions regarding the poem.  The students practice fluency as they read the poem to others.  The students are working on identifying numerals, number words and ten frames.  The grade one students are working on numbers 1 through 10 and grade two students are working on numbers 1 to 20.  Practice writing out the number words with your child. 

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  I checked Raz Kids over the weekend and saw that many students have started to do the readings and quizzes.  When you sit with your child as they read the stories, please encourage them to use different reading strategies and to think about the story.  The students worked on writers' workshop today.  The students had the choice to work on a new piece or work on a previous piece.  In small groups we discussed the writing rubric and what to keep in mind when writing.  Ask your child what we are looking for in writing.  We just wrapped up Data Management in math today and we will begin Number Sense tomorrow.  The grade one students will work on one to one correspondence with number words and the grade two students will begin with anchoring numbers to ten.  The grade one students are working on different ways in telling time, such as day and night, seasons, days, months, hours etc. The grade two students are comparing traditions and celebrations.

The students are almost finished their unit in Data Management.  The grade one students have been working diligently on creating tally marks and recording their data on a bar graph.  It is important that the grade one students know the 6 parts to the graph.  The grade two students have also been working on bar graphs, but have recently started pictographs.  They are learning to use symbols to represent their data and understanding scale.  For example, one symbol representing 5 votes.  Since it is a short week, the students will have their spelling test on the Thursday rather than the Friday.  Please make sure they are practicing their words at home. 

The grade one students have been working on telling time in Social Studies.  They started with daytime and nighttime and we are currently looking at different seasons.  We have discussed the activities associated with the seasons and the behaviour of animals.  The grade two students have been comparing traditions with classmates.

Starting next week, the students will begin the Snuggle Up Program.  The students will take home a book at their reading level to read and log into their reading log.  They will also have an opportunity to log onto the website Raz Kids for supplementary reading.

Each day of the week, the students work on a different language task.  One day is designated for spelling activities where the students practice their spelling words for the week and look at different grammatical structures and proofreading strategies.  One day is also designated for poetry where students read the poem and create "mental pictures" of the poem.  It is then followed up  with writing activities that also look at different writing strategies, such as rhyming words, sentence structure, sound blends, etc.  Today, the students worked on Writers’ Workshop.  They have already created a brainstorming web at the back of their notebook to refer to each time they are to write during WW (Writers' Workshop) about all the different ideas they can write about during WW and started their first writing piece.  Today's lesson that we discussed was about “the main idea” and “supporting details”.  Ask your child about these two concepts.  We are still working on Data Management in math.  We should be wrapping up the unit at the end of this week.  The grade one students continue to complete a tally chart by surveying their classmates and creating a bar graph based on the data they collect.  The grade two students have been working on pictographs where a symbol must represents their data.  They must choose how many students/people each symbol represents.   

Hello everyone,

We have been reading many read alouds in class this past week.  Read alouds allow students to hear the classroom teacher model fluency and expression. It also exposes them to vocabulary that is just beyond their own instructional level.  This is important as students become aware that “Reading is Thinking”.  As a class, we have been looking at making predictions at the beginning of the book, during the story and at the end of the story.  We have also been making different types of connections, such as text to self, text to text, text to world, and text to media.  When reading with your children at home, ask your child to make a connection.  We are continuing with our daily routine of the morning meeting in which students have the opportunity to correct language mistakes in our morning message, graph the temperature and learn place value and money.  In math, we are still working on data management.  The students are practising how to ask good survey questions, tally their results, record the data in their graphs and then create conclusions.