What's New This Week

I can't believe Spring Break is already over and we've been back at school for our second week.

 

Reading and Writing

 

Before we left for Spring break, we celebrated everything to do with leprechauns and St. Patrick's Day. We engaged ourselves in a whole lot of St. Patrick's Day themed writing and story retelling.

 

Since we've been back, we have continued on with our story retelling unit with a fairy tales theme. We read two familiar fairy tales last week - "Cinderella" and "The Princess and the Pea". For each of the stories, we completed a "someone, wanted, but, so, finally" activity page to help develop our retelling skills. We also completed a directed drawing, crayon and water colour resist art project to compliment our "Princess and the Pea" activity. We will continue our retelling unit this week and hopefully move on to creating and writing our very own fairy tales next week.

 

Math

In the area of Math, we have started a new theme unit focusing on solving word problem. Our goals for this unit include solving a variety a word problems involving addition and subtraction, and using different strategies which may include :

- using a number line

- using tens frames

- drawing a picture

- drawing tally marks and

- using manipulatives

 

We have also learned to recognize several "signal" words which assist us in recognizing whether a word problem is asking us to add or subtract.

 

Addition Signal Words

more

combined

in all

sum

altogether

total

plus

 

Subtraction Signal Words

less

take away

fewer

how many more

decrease

difference

minus

 

 

Spelling

 

During this week's spelling unit, we will focus on the r-controlled spelling pattern ar. Our weekly words are now posted on spellingcity.com. Be sure to visit spellingcity.com for extra practice and review at home.

Looking for Leprechauns

We've been reading all about Ireland, St. Patrick's Day and leprechauns. Here are some of the books we've read and activities we have completed.

 

On Monday, we read "The Luckiest St. Patrick's Day Ever". After reading the story, we shared some our luckiest memories and wrote about them. We also completed some cute leprechauns to go along with our writing.

 

On Tuesday, we read "The Leprechaun's Gold" and completed another cute writing activity.

 

Finally, today we read "Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato". Here is a link to an online version of the story.

 

 

We also completed a sequencing activity where we retold the beginning, middle and end. Unfortunately, I did not get any photos of this.

 

We also started a little creative story writing assignment. Each of the students wrote about what they would do if they ever caught a leprechaun. We are going to take our "rough" story drafts into the computer lab tomorrow and complete a published version that we can print and display in the hallway. We're hoping that all this leprechaun themed writing and art work will attract some sneaky little leprechaun guests to come and visit us in our classroom before the end of the week. Guess we'll just have to wait and see!

 

In other news, we are just finishing up our gymnastics unit for P.E. The students rotated through a number of stations which included parallel bars, climbing apparatus, spring boards, ropes, and balance beams. Over the past two weeks, the students visited each station in a circuit-like rotation. I was very proud of each and everyone for following through with all safety measures and precautions. This has definitely been one of our favourite gym units to date.

 

 

 

Don't forget --- Friday is Emerald City Day!

Come dressed-up in your best green gear!!!!!

 

 

Breakfast With Santa and Pajama Day

Breakfast with Santa was a huge success. A great big thank you to all the PAC members and the rest of the parents for organizing such a great event. The kids loved every minute of it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Angelina the Elf with a couple of friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Merry Christmas everyone!

Enjoy the holidays and the extra time you will have to spend with family and friends.

- Mrs. Singh

 

Elf Applications And A Little Fa La La

Today we performed "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" at our school's Christmas concert. We did a great job! Among all of our Christmas concert excitement, it also snowed a ton the entire day. We could help but take a class photo with all the snow in the background. Here we are smiling and posing politely for the camera.

 

How could we not take a goofy photo?

 

 

Speaking of concerts and singing...
Here are some adorable Christmas carolers we made over the past week to inspire us while we practiced for this special night.

 

 

In other news, Santa sent us an urgent memo! It seems that he may need some back-up elves to help him up in the North Pole. You know, just in case one of his regular elves comes down with the flu. Of course we all wanted to apply for the job. Here are a few of our elf job applications.

 

Amy applied to be a baker elf. Her previous experience includes cooking with her Mom and she would also like to learn a little more about measuring. I think Amy would make a great baker elf. Her desired pay is marshmallows. I am sure the North Pole has plenty of those.

 

 

Lucia applied to be a stable elf. She has a lot of experience with horses. She enjoys feeding and riding horses and reindeer are similar to horses so she feels she would be perfect for the job. I think so too! She would love to be payed with sour keys! Yum!

 

Puneet applied to be an elf spy. The kind that checks up on children to see if they are being naughty or nice. Her previous experience includes spying on her brother. Apparently she is also great at playing pranks on her brother as well. I am positive that the North Pole needs someone like you, Puneet! Puneet's desired pay is nothing. She'll just do it for free!

 

 

I guess we'll just have to wait and see if any of Santa's elves come down with the flu or anything else.

 

I hope the snow lasts overnight and does not get washed away. We did not get a chance to enjoy it today. Maybe tomorrow.

 

-Mrs. Singh

 

 

 

 

 

Math, Singing, and Adjectives

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.

 

- Mrs Singh





A Turkey For Thanksgiving

Today I read one of my favourite Thanksgiving stories to my students - A Turkey For Thanksgiving by Eve Bunting.

Two moose (husband and wife) are preparing their table for Thanksgiving dinner. They have all the places ready for all the animals to join them (rabbit, goat, sheep, etc). The only thing missing is .... you guessed it -  the turkey!  Mrs. Moose is extremely sad that they will not have a turkey, so her husband sets off to find one. Along the way he picks up all the animals that are going to join them for dinner and they attempt to find the turkey they want. They finally find one and the turkey takes off running in the other direction. Mr. Moose grabs him and takes him back in preparation to make Thanksgiving dinner complete. When they all get back, Mr.turkey is shocked to see an extra chair for him to sit in. He realizes that they weren't going to eat him, they wanted him to join them as a guest and he is very thankful for that.

After reading the story, the students were given a set of sentence strips. They placed the sentence strips in the correct sequence to practise retelling the story. Once they were done, the students read the sentence strips and "story" back to me.

On another note, thank you to everyone for getting their field trip permission slips in to me. I appreciate it. Have a nice evening.

 

-Mrs. Singh