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





Nouns And A Little About the Farm

Today was jam-packed with noun activities! First, the students helped me generate a list of nouns and I wrote them on the board. Once we finished making the list, we sorted the nouns into three different categories (person/animal, place, or thing). Next, to help prepare for our field trip to Kidz Discovery Farm, each student was given a collection of farm related nouns to cut apart. Afterwards, they independently created a tri-fold book and glued the nouns under the appropriate categories. All the kids did a great job and I was very impressed!

 

Our weekly spelling program is well underway and I am already beginning to see improvements in our reading, particularly with the phonics patterns that have been introduced. As our weekly spelling routines continue, I am sure we will see our phonics skills improve even more. Parents don't always get to see what we do with our words once the week is over, so I wanted to explain a little bit more about our 5  high frequency words that are introduced along side our patterned words. Just above our classroom blackboard is a an alphabet wall, or what we refer to as a "wordwall". As we learn new high frequency words each week in spelling, the words are added under the correct letter. It is a great resource for the students to reference throughout the year. Our "wordwall" is a little boring to look at right now as there are only 10 words on it, however I will try and post a few pictures in the next couple of weeks.

 

One more reminder - remember  to bring your booster seat for tomorrow's field trip. An extra thank you to all those parents that volunteered to drive tomorrow. Your support is greatly appreciated.

 

-Mrs. Singh