May 24-28

 

I want to start this post by saying thank you to the parents for all their hard work over the past two weeks while the students were at home.  I know that many of you were managing work from home as well as trying to support one, two, or more kids with their school work.  I know what a challenge this has been.  Thanks to all of your work, your kids have continued to grow and learn.  

Our first four days back have been packed with activity and learning.  Here is some of what we have been up to.

Students have done some journal writing this week to share their feelings about being back in person.  I am impressed at how independent the students have become with their journal writing and how adept they are becoming with adding some descriptive words and supportive details to their writing.

We also started a new reading and writing project this week.  We have decided to use our growing skills in order to learn about a wild animal that lives in Alberta.  Students had so many animals that they were interested in that it was hard to choose just one that we could work on together.  After several rounds of voting, we finally chose to learn about garter snakes.  We will be using books, videos and on line resources to collect information.  We will then do some non-fiction writing about garter snakes and we will finish by learning how to put this information into a google slide presentation.  The students are very excited to learn about this amazing animal.

We had a chance to get out and do a little weeding to prepare our flower boxes. We are looking forward to getting a bit of planting done in the next little bit as well. Please remind your child to not play inside of these boxes, even in the winter, as we have preninals and annuals going into them.



Our Math this week has been focussed on developing flexibility with addition and subtraction through learning about part, part, whole.  We have been working on equations that are in a different order and that have a missing number, not just looking for the sum or difference.  Example 4+__=12 or 16=6+__ as well as

12-__=4 or __-8=5. This has been challenging work, but it really helps students develop flexibility in their mathematical thinking.

In Phys. Ed., we are revisiting skipping this month as a way to be physically active outside.  We do have individual skipping ropes, hola hoops and skip-it's, but the students are welcome to bring their personal skipping ropes to school, if they like.  If your child wants to bring his/her own rope, please ensure that he/she have their name on their rope so that there is no confusion.  Students have become more comfortable with jumping with the teacher turning the big rope.  I will be helping them to learn how to turn a large rope with a partner so that they can skip with a group of friends.  We will also be learning some skipping rhymes.



We are wrapping up our colour unit this week with an exploration of using natural objects to create colours.  Just before our on-line learning, we gathered up some natural materials and soaked them in boiling water to see if we could extract some colour.  We used blueberries, raspberries, turmeric root, beet root, coffee, onion skins, and red cabbage.  Students made predictions about the colours and this week we made observations of the results.  Then we used the natural colour to paint a landscape picture that we drew. 


Thanks to all of the parents who sent in recycled materials for our upcoming building unit.  We will be sorting our supplies after school today and will let you know if there is anything else that we are looking for that you can collect for us.  The students are dying to find out what building projects we will be working on in the coming weeks.

The last 4 weeks of school always go by so quickly.  Please check the blog each week to keep up to date with the things that we are doing.

Upcoming

Monday May 31 - Home Reading Exchange

Thursday June 3 - Home Reading Exchange

Friday June 4 - Library Exchange

Monday June 7 - Home Reading Exchange

Thursday June 10 - Coulee Walk - Afternoon

Popular posts from this blog

Nov 30 - Dec 3

Image
It is hard to believe that we have made it to December.  This is my favourite time of year in grade one as students are really starting to come into their own.  They have come so far in the past three months and it is exciting to celebrate their work. In Language Arts this week, we have been focusing on extend ing our writing.  We are recognizing that more writing is only better if it gives us more information about the topic we are sharing.  Of course, with the holidays approaching, students were eager to write about their family traditions.  We had several discussions around what things we do that are similar to our friends and some of our traditions that may be unique.  I hope that you and your child had a chance to do some writing together this past week for the Celebration of Learning and to look at our writing rubric.  If you have not yet done this activity, please look for it in our Google Classroom.  I will leave it posted until December 4...
Read more

Sept 28-Oct 2

Image
Our last week of September has been a busy one.  Here is what we have been working on: In Language Arts, students looked at a variety of pictures to decide how improving their drawing could help them do a better job in their journal work.  Students then attempted to include details in their journal pictures in order to help tell the story of their weekend.  Students are in various stages of adding print to their work.  Some are labeling and adding a few letters while others are attempting to write a complete sentence.  Here is the steps our class decided on what makes a more detailed picture. In Math, we continued to work on printing and representing the numbers, but we were most excited to explore sorting and measuring with our fall leaves.  We sorted our leaves by colour, size, shape, and texture.  We have continued to observe the changes in trees during the fall season.  We got outside to complete a See, Think, Wonder page in our visual jo...
Read more

Happy Holidays!

Image
 I hope that everyone has a wonderful break with time to rest and relax. The class asked to have access to the following jib jab that they enjoyed watching in class: https://www.jibjab.com/view/make/snowman_scurry/1c02832c-1bc5-482c-aab1-1aa48896eedb I am looking forward to seeing  everyone on-line on January 5, 2021!
Read more