Wasn't October just so much fun??? I love all the writing, science and art activities that this month allows to really get students super excited about learning! I mean..... who doesn't want to learn about nouns using Halloween creatures or about adjectives to describe witches and frankenstein? Did I mention experimenting with pumpkins and learning to make predictions while searching for a candy bandit?
We wrapped up our month of fun with a Halloween celebration. This morning we divided up into 4 groups and rotated through a variety of Halloween centres which included some Math number games, sticker patterning, Frankenstein ABC order, and a cute jack-o-lantern craftivity.
Halloween Centre Rotations
After recess we watched a wonderful movie called "The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin". This movie is about a very unique pumpkin and delivers a special message of tolerance and self-acceptance. Next, several students chose to visit a fun and exciting haunted house put together by some wonderful parents. Finally after lunch, the entire school participated in a Halloween parade to show off our amazing costumes.
Little Red Riding Hood and Medusa
So many amazing costumes!
Such a fun day! AND...the kids couldn't have been more excited or thrilled about the whole thing!
I hear few more trick-or-treaters knocking at my front door. Time for me to hand out the last of the Halloween candy. Hope you are enjoying your night of trick-or-treats!
Today started out just like any other day at school. We wrote our morning message in our planners, we talked a little bit about our expectations for Halloween and even completed a writing activity. This was just about the time when things got a little interesting. We decided to visit Mr. Mallinson's class to do a little Halloween poem writing but when we returned to class...
...the Candy Corn Bandit had been in our room and had taken all of our Halloween treats. In place of the treats was this little guy (see above), a note and some activity books with instructions for making predictions.
Where could he have taken our candy?
Was it in the library, the gym, in the school yard????
We quickly made our prediction and recorded them in the books the Candy Corn Bandit had left for us.
The only way to find out if our predictions were correct was to follow the clues left throughout the school by the Candy Corn Bandit himself. The first clue had us turning our classroom upside down. We finally found the second clue taped to the bottom of a table. The second clue took us all the way to the gym, The third clue had us searching the playground and the fourth clue took us into the library. After reading the fifth and final clue, we predicted that the treats would be back in our class and when we got there.....
Yay! Success!
All our hard work paid off!
Our treats were safe and sound, ready for Halloween day!
Keep your eyes and ears opened. Halloween isn't over yet and you never know when he might come back for another visit or adventure.
This post is purely to brag about the amazing kids I teach. First of all, we are only into the fifth week of our spelling program and already everyone is demonstrating so much improvement in their reading and writing. All your hard work definitely shows!
WAY-TO-GO Division 4!!!!!!!
Every week, the students are given several ideas for extra spelling help at home. One of the suggestions is to come up with their own creative and fun way to practise their words. Two of my lovely little leaders in grade two have surpassed my expectations the last two weeks and have come up with the coolest projects! The classroom has definitely been filled with many oooohhhhs and aaaahhhhhs! You can see their amazing work below.
Some "sweet spelling" cookies by the lovely Amy!
Amy also came up with the idea for "spicy spelling" and used white glue to write each of the spelling words on construction paper.
Then she sprinkled the glue with some delicious smelling spices. Unfortunately, my camera was not at school that day so I was unable to take a photo.
A spooky spelling graveyard and a spelling mobile by the sweet Alexis!
Wow! What creative ways to practise our words!
We wrapped-up our pumpkin study today by writing a pumpkin diamante poem. A diamante poem is a poem in the shape of a diamond. Each line uses specific types of words, like adjectives. It does not have to rhyme. After we completed our poem, we used chalk pastels to create these pumpkin patch scenes.
Today we had our first WITS assembly at school. The WITS Programs brings together schools, families and communities to create responsive environments that help elementary school children deal with bullying and peer victimization. The WITS Primary Program teaches children to make safe and positive choices when faced with peer conflict. The WITS acronym - Walk away, Ignore, Talk it out, and Seek help - provides a common language that children and the adults in their environments can use to talk about and respond to peer victimization. If you would like to learn more about this program you can click here.
Our assembly was approximately 30-minutes long and involved all students, Kindergarten to Grade 7. In this special assembly, the WITS program was introduced by our school's Officer Liaison. The students recited a WITS oath, received a WITS badge and were deputized as WITS Special Constables. Throughout the course of the school year, the students will continue to engage in a number of lessons and stories related to the WITS program. Additionally, community leaders such as our school's Officer Liaison, may make follow-up classroom visits. The students enjoyed the assembly and were excited about making safe and positive behaviour choices. Here are a few photos from today's assembly.
On another note, I came across a great website today. It is called We Give Books. It has a number of free online books! The Editor's Picks are free for anyone to read, anytime, anywhere, and on any device - without logging in. What a great way to encourage reading. I will definitely be using this resource at our computer centre and computer lab times. If you would like to check it out, just click on the link below.
We completed our Frankenstein adjective writing activity today.
Last week, each of the students used their imagination and creativity to make their own Frankenstein picture. The one and only rule was that he had to be interesting enough so that they could each come up with a bunch of adjectives to describe him. The kids were super engaged and let me tell you, I could have heard a pin drop in the classroom, that's how hard they were working. After we finished our Frankenstein pictures everyone was given a piece of writing paper. The students came up with a number of descriptive sentences to describe their very own Frankenstein.
Today we revisited our Frankenstein writing. First we used our writers eyes to edit for appropriate upper and lower-case letters, fingers spaces between words, and appropriate punctuation. When our editing was complete, we used our highlighters to underline the adjectives in our sentences. Finally we partnered up with a classmate and read our work aloud. Overall, I think they did an amazing job!
In Math, we started our FACT FAMILY unit. A Math fact family is a group of addition and subtraction number sentences that are alike in some way. Each family has two addition facts that have the same addends and sum.Addends are the numbers you add together and the sum is the answer. If you switch the addends to the problem, the sum stays the same. The fact family will also have two related subtraction questions.
Here is an example:
2 + 3 = 5 and 3 + 2 = 5
5 - 2 = 3and 5 - 3 = 2
I explained to the students that the largest number is like the Dad. He always goes at the end of the addition sentences after the equals sign. However, in the subtraction sentences the larger number or "Dad" always goes at the beginning. Here's a little visual I introduced to help them understand the concept a little easier.
After our group lesson, we went back to our desks and worked on our own individual fact family activity to demonstrate our understanding and learning.
We'll be continuing our Math fact family study over the next couple weeks so that we can really grasp this concept.
Speaking of families, we also discussed word families today. The grade ones are focusing on the short /u/ vowel pattern in their spelling this week. We brainstormed a huge list of short /u/ words and then sorted them into the different word family endings. Here's what we came up with:
Wow! What a lot of words! We'll keep adding to the list throughout the week.
Today was all about pumpkins, pumpkins, and more pumpkins!
To start our pumpkin activities off, we read the story It's Pumpkin Time by Zoe Hall. We learned all about how a pumpkin starts off as a tiny seed, grows into a sprout, and then into a vine type plant. Soon a brightly coloured flower appears and after awhile a tiny green pumpkin.The little green pumpkin gets bigger and bigger and soon becomes a fully grown orange pumpkin. That's how a pumpkin grows!
After our story and group discussion, the students demonstrated what they had learned by creating the cutest 3-dimensional pumpkin life cycle craftivity. This is one amazing class because every single one of their projects turned out awesome. Here are a few examples:
After recess, we worked on some Pumpkin Math / Science activities with our big buddies in division 2. The students rotated through seven different stations which included everything from measuring the height and distance around, counting the lines on our pumpkins, weighing our pumpkins, predicting whether our pumpkins will sink or float, determining what kind of force will make our pumpkins move, and predicting/counting the seeds inside our pumpkins. We recorded all of our learning in our Pumpkin Investigation Notebooks. Here are some photos of all our hard work and pumpkin fun!
Counting the lines on our pumpkins
Measuring the distance around
Measuring the height
Sink or Float Experiment
Counting Seeds
Recording our results
I hope everyone had a fun day learning all about pumpkins!
The last two days have been jammed packed with learning. To begin with, I'll write a little bit about our Math program. Part of the grade one and two curriculum's include counting by 1's, 2's, 5's, and 10 forward and backwards to 100. A great way to practise this is to connect counting with our different Canadian coins. Yesterday, we joined with division 3 ( Mr. Mallinson's class) and broke up into small groups of about 6-8 students. Each group was assigned a different Canadian coin. The groups worked together to create short skits counting by the value of their coin (for example, the nickel group counted by 5's, dime group by 10's etc.) The students did an amazing job working cooperatively and they came up with really creative ways to present their skits. We also had a lot of fun. After our skits, we listened and sang a song by Canadian song writer Michael Mitchell called "Canada In My Pocket". It is a great song to teach students about the symbols of Canada as well as make connections to our Canadian coins and counting. If you would like to listen to it at home, click on the link below.
We have also been working on strengthening our basic addition and subtraction skills. So far, the grade ones have been working on addition and subtraction facts with answers up to 6 and the grade twos have been reviewing addition and subtraction facts with answers up to 18. Since it is October, the grade ones were given a bunch of spooky addition and subtraction facts. Their job was to sort the math facts into two groups (addition or subtraction questions). After sorting, the grade ones solved each of the questions. This activity focused on the importance of not only recognizing addition and subtraction symbols but also had them choosing their favourite strategy to use to solve each question. The grade twos had a similar activity but rather than sort into addition and subtraction groups, they were required to sort their questions into groups with answers that equalled 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, or 18. Our addition and subtraction skills are improving everyday.
And onto ADJECTIVES....
Today we read a book called "We're Going To The Witch's House". This story uses a lot of amazing vocabulary to describe different Halloween creatures you might see while trick-or-treating. After listening to the story, we made a class chart with all the adjectives we heard throughout the story. We also brainstormed a few of our own by looking at the pictures and describing what we saw.
(Ooops, I don't have any pictures of our chart-sorry)
Afterwards, the students wrote down several different creatures they might see on Halloween night and independently chose their favourite adjective to describe the creature. I quickly circled the room and helped them fix their spelling as well as correct any words that weren't actually
adjectives. We'll save this resource for some future Halloween sentence and story writing that we will be working on next week.
We are definitely not finished with our noun and adjective study and the Halloween season is the perfect time of year to improve our skills.
That's all I have for now. I hope everyone is having a great week.
Today we went on our first field trip to Kidz Discovery Farm at the P.N.E. It was a lot of fun!
It all started with a tour of a miniature mock farm where the students were able to plant some tomato and carrot seeds.
Next, we all travelled through a grain silo and collected some packages with different grains. From there we moved through a small cow barn and pretended to milk a cow. This was followed by another garden where our carrot and tomato seeds had magically sprouted and full grown tomatoes and carrots had grown.
Then came the apple orchard and chicken coop. We each picked one apple from the tree and chose either a brown or white egg to add to our basket of farm goodies.
Soon we were at the salmon farm, where we were able to try out some fishing and catch a fish or two.
Finally, our favourite, was riding in the miniature tractors around a small track.
When our tour was over, we sorted all the different farm foods we collected in our baskets and learned how the food we eat begins at the farm and makes its way to our local market and grocery stores.
After eating our lunches, we were able to watch the process of milking an adult cow and meet a baby calf.
We also got to pick a pumpkin from a pumpkin patch and over the next couple of days as well as into the next week, we will complete some fun pumpkin math activities and a few pumpkin experiments. When all our experiments are completed, our pumpkins will be sent home just in time to carve them for Halloween.
Speaking of Halloween, here's a cute pumpkin song that I thought some of you might enjoy. Maybe we'll even sing it in class. Just click on the link below to watch and listen to it.
