Why I Like To Inference by Puneet

We have been lerning how to inference this week. It is fun and I lerned alot. It's like being a detective and it's fun looking for clooes.

A Smorgasbord of Stuff

I'm back and feeling 100% better. All the hugs I got today sure helped out as well. I missed every single one of my 20 amazing students and am so happy to be back.

 

Today I introduced the class to a new reading comprehension strategy called inferencing. Inferring is understanding what is not written with

words in the books we read. We can take clues from the text (pictures clues, word clues, or how a character behaves and acts) and our schema (what we already know) to form a new idea.

We started our first lesson with a mystery box activity. I placed an object inside of a sealed box. The students took turns shaking the box and using their senses to guess what was inside. We recorded our guesess on a large chart. Next, the students were given four clues to help with their thinking .

1. It is black.

2. It is round.

3. It is made of glass.

4. It helps you to see different things in our world.

We recorded their new guesses on the chart and after a lot of discussion we opened up the mystery box to find...

You'll just have to ask them to find out what was inside. Now that we are warmed up and are becoming inference investigators, we'll be engaging in a number of activities over the next week or two to strengthen this important reading comprehension skill.

 

Computer Lab

After our Language Arts lesson, we headed up to the computer lab. The students have been working toward improving their keyboarding skills. At the beginning of each computer lab time, we take 10 -15 minutes to practice our keyboarding skills. You can visit the website that we use by clicking here. We've only been using this website since we returned from Winter break, but already I am seeing improvements in their keyboarding skills.

 

 

After our ten minutes of keyboarding practice, the students are always given the choice to continue or choose one of the teacher approved activities listed in their computer lab duo-tangs.

 

This may include accessing our raz-kids reading accounts,

 

engaging in some Math activities on Starfall Math,

 

or using our creative sides to create images on Kidpix.

 

Math

You may have noticed your child coming home with a Math activity containing 12 math addition or subtraction questions. These are part of our daily addition and subtraction Math drills. The students are given 1 minute and 30 seconds to complete the twelve questions. If they are able to complete all twelve question correctly during the given time, they move onto the next drill sheet. If they are unable to correctly answer each of the questions, they will receive the same drill the next day. Our goal is to have all students memorize their basic math facts in order to help them be successful with double digit addition and subtraction, a skill taught in grade two.

 

Literacy Day

This Friday is Family Literacy Day. I hope that many of you will be able to spend the first part of the morning reading with your child and engaging in some of the literacy activities happening throughout our school. Today the students chose their favourite book and created a cute craftivity to showcase our book recommendations for others to read.

 

 

Here are a few of our favourite fiction books.

 

As well as a few of our favourite non-fiction books.

 

 

Finally, here are two of our favourite classroom books decorating our classroom doors. These have been part of our read aloud times this year.

 

 

Gym

Last week I posted a few videos showcasing our amazing hula hooping skills. After another week of practice, we are now able to perform some more unbelievable tricks.

 

Here the are.....

*changes in level of body position while hula hooping

 

*changing the position of the hula hoop from our necks to our arms

*hula hooping while on our knees

 

Have a nice evening!

-Mrs. Singh

Where Is Mrs.Singh?

I stayed pretty late after school on Friday to decorate our classroom doors and get them ready for family literacy day this week. Thank goodness I did, because on Saturday I caught something awful. The dreaded FLU. UGH! So for the past couple days, I have been quarantined to my home, which is why I have not been at school these last few days. Hopefully I will be well enough to make it back for tomorrow and we can get started on some of the other fun literacy activities I had planned for the week. Speaking of which, I hope everyone is planning on coming dressed-up as their favourite character from a book. I have a few ideas, I just need to narrow them down to one.

In the meantime, our spelling pattern this week is the consonant digraph /th/. I uploaded our spelling lists to Spellingcity.com for some extra practice and fun games. Hopefully everyone received their lists in their spelling journals. I made sure these were ready to go before I left on Friday. 

Hope you are enjoying your week and hopefully I will see everyone tomorrow.

-Mrs.Singh

Place Value, Penguins and Hula Hooping

SNOW DAY!

 We spent a few extra minutes outside today to enjoy the small amount of flurries that accumulated on our school field. Wow, was it ever cold outside. Don't forget to bring your snow gear to school tomorrow,this includes your mittens and toques, just in case the cold weather keeps up.

Last week, we started making some New Years goals. They are all on display outside of our classroom. We will be working hard to accomplish these goals throughout the year.

In Math, we have been working on place value. We have been completing many hands-on activities to help us strengthen this important skill. One of our favourite and engaging activities we have completed are creating our initials with base ten blocks and recording the value.

We have also been learning a whole lot about penguins and non-fiction text features.

We are also creating our own non-fiction penguin reports. So far, we have written about how penguins look, where they live, what they eat, and about penguin families. My students favourite part has been learning about how the adult penguins regurgitate into the penguins chick's mouth to feed their baby. Totally gross but awesome at the same time!

Our non-fiction reports should be completed by next week and I can't wait to display all their learning and hard work.

Along with our study of penguins, we've been reading some works of fiction from the Tacky Penguin series. So far we've completed a Tacky the penguin craftivity, a Tacky descriptive writing assignment (adjectives) for the stories Tacky the Penguin and Tacky in Trouble. Tomorrow we'll be reading Three Cheers for Tacky and completing a few more writing activities based on the series.

Finally, in gym, we are learning to improve our hula hoop and skipping skills. I  was able to capture a few short videos that showcase some of our amazing hula hooping accomplishments. These kids are ROCK STARS!

The next two are some of the awesome tricks we have been practicing. The first one is hula hooping around the knees and the second one around the neck.

I cannot figure out how to change the position of the last two videos so you will have to view them sideways. If anyone knows how I can change this please let me know. I have tried everything.

Enjoy your evening. See you tomorrow!

- Mrs. Singh

Place Value, Penguins and Resolutions

Welcome Back! It was great to get back into the swing of things at school. We started the day off with a little New Years fun. Every hour on the hour we opened up a brown paper bag with a message, treat or activity for all of the students. It was our way of celebrating and counting down the day since we could not be could all be together on New Years Eve. At 9:00 we found new erasers for everyone in our first paper bag. At 10:00, our paper bag contained a silly message stating that we could work with our shoes off (this was, by far, our favourite). At 11:00 we found 20 sets of sparkly stickers to share with each other. At 12:00 we found another message encouraging us to chat with our friends. At 1:00 our paper bag contained sour keys for everybody to enjoy and finally at 2:00, another message giving us 20 minutes of free centre time. Not only was it fun and exciting waiting for each hour to roll around, it also gave us a little practice and review with telling time.

 

We also wrote some personal and school resolutions to work toward as we start the month of January. We read the story Squirrel's New Year's Resolution by Pat Miller, to help us better understand what is a resolution and why we make them. I found this video link of the story if you would like to hear it again.

 

 

In Math, we started learning about place value. We will be learning about the ones, tens, and hundreds place values for the next couple of weeks. This can be a difficult concept for some students to really grasp but we'll continue to practice it everyday. Here is a great place value song and video to reinforce what we will be learning in class.

 

 

Finally, in the afternoon we started our study of penguins. This theme unit will be part of our Science curriculum, however it will provide us with a ton of opportunities to learn about non-fiction text features and complete a whole lot of non-fiction informational writing. It should be a lot of fun since I also have some fun craftivities planned to incorporate as well.

 

Well, that's a little snapshot of our first day back.

See you tomorrow!

-Mrs. Singh

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

 

I hope everybody had a wonderful holiday and is refreshed and ready for school tomorrow.

Although we'll be focusing a lot on goal setting and creating some classroom new years resolutions, we'll also be getting back into the swing of some of our regular weekly routines. The first of which is spelling. Over the next four weeks our focus will be on consonant digraphs. Consonant digraphs are when two consonant letters are paired together to make a new sound. These digraphs can be located at the beginning or end of the word. This week, we will focus on the consonant digraph /sh/.

 

Spelling City has a few new games they have added to their website. I really enjoyed READ-A-WORD and I am sure you will too.  Click here to access our class homepage for some fun online ways to study our weekly spelling words.

 

I also came across this cute video. How many /sh/ words can you guess as you watch this short video clip?

 

See everybody tomorrow!

 

-Mrs. Singh