December 17, 2015

I cannot believe it's Christmas break already!

We've had a busy week and are certainly ready for the break.

This week in Literacy we've created a class book based on Amy Krouse Rosenthals book, Christmas Cookies: Bite-Sized Holiday Lessons.

In Math, we've continued to look at simple addition for grade 1's, and how addition and subtraction are related for grade 2's.

In Social Studies, we've been looking at the physical geography of Nunavut and reflected on our ideas of the Arctic based on artwork inspired by Tom Thomson. 

Have a safe and happy winter break! School resumes on Monday January 4, 2016!

December 11, 201

Literacy

This week in literacy we've looked at the oral traditions of the Inuit people. We studied how folktale and artwork of the Inuit people play an important cultural role. Students assembled in groups to choose an animal or artifact and create a folktale about the creation or significance of the animal/artifact. Student's did a great job!

Sharing an oral story

Math

This week in math we've been looking at addition skills without regrouping for grade 1's and some regrouping with grade 2's. 

Something important students can be working on at home is practicing basic addition facts.

Science

We completed our study on Colour this week with looking at how we can create translucent washes with paint from an opaque wash.

Social Studies

We've continued to look at the life the Inuit people and the geography. We had a parent come in to help us with printmaking an Inuit/Arctic print. Our learners really enjoyed learning about printmaking and the process.

Showing us a print.

A sample of a student's print.

The printmaking process.

Yes Day!

Student's earned their first "Yes Day" of this school year which they had on Friday.

December 4, 2015

Social Studies

This week in our class we've spent a greater part of the week exploring the history, cultures and traditions of the Inuit of northern Canada. We did this work all day on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

We've been looking at a variety of actual artifacts borrowed from the Glenbow to help us learn about how the Inuit traditionally lived and what life is like today in the city of Iqaluit.

Thank you to the parent volunteers who came in to help with this endeavor. 

Here are some photo's from our week.

Here's the High School in Iqaluit. Student's wondered why the school doesn't have windows. Why do you think they don't have windows?

Math

Our grade 1's have been looking at 1 more, 1 less and 2 more, 2 less.
Our grade 2's have continued to explore place value and have learned some place value games.

November 27, 2015

Literacy

This week in Literacy we've been focused on directed journal writing. We journaled about a different topic each day, including topics such as Describe your favorite recess games, describing a new type of food, descriptive monster writing, your 'dream day'. We've also continued our usual word and sentence level work, as well as guided reading groups.

Math

Our grade 1's have been focused on the concepts of creating one more and one less of a number. Please work with your children on this concept at home.

Our grade 2's have been working on concepts of place value and describing their value, finding their place in a number. We've also been looking at what happens when we add and subtract zero from any given number and describing the properties of zero.

Science

This week in science we've been working collaboratively with our friends in room 1 in Science. We've been examining the concepts and properties of materials that are transparent, opaque and translucent. We completed a science experiment where student's rotated around different stations of liquids to decide if they were transparent or opaque. Students also had opportunities to create Christmas baubles that are transparent, opaque and translucent as well.

Is ketchup transparent or opaque?

Is Spaghetti sauce transparent or opaque?

Creating a translucent bauble.

Social Studies

We've continued to look at our prairie region, looking at the similiaries of Saskatoon and Calgary. We've looked at what a vibrant city Saskatoon is and explored how similar our cities are!

P.E.

We've begun our Floor Hockey unit in P.E.

November 19, 2015

Literacy

This week in literacy we've been focused on sentence level work. We've been looking at what makes a good sentence. We've discuss what a sentence is and simple rules and patterns of a sentence. We've also looked at the the use of uppercase to start a sentence (and proper nouns) and end in a punctuation mark (period/full stop) to form a complete thought, 

Math

This week in math we've been examining what place value is (the numerical value a digit has by virtue of its position in a number), how we can express the values of the digits using base 10 blocks.

Here is a fun website you can visit with your child to have some fun representing numbers through base 10 blocks.

http://www.abcya.com/base_ten_fun.htm

Social Studies

This week we've continued to look at the prairie region, looking at the landforms, artifacts and buildings of the prairie. We've also begun a discussion on how the land can form the lifestyles of those who live in it.

Watercolour of a prairie field

Line art drawing of a grain elevator.

Roots of Empathy

We had our second family visit this week with baby Harper. It's been fun and exciting to watch her grow and develop!

November 13, 2015

Sorry of the delay in posting!

Literacy

We finished off our story writing with our "inanimate characters". Watch for this piece to come home in our red folders!

We then looked at creating character profiles for one of our characters such as their name, age, favourite things, etc.

Math

This week in math we've been looking at how we can use referents to help us count. This meant dumping objects on our desk and finding good ways to sort them out to making counting easier. We looked at how grouping objects by 5's and 10's was a great way to organize them to help us count. We then did this again, but Mr. C took a photo of our groupings. We printed it out to show our parents how we do this, which will also be in our red folders next week.

Science

We've continued to look at secondary colours and how we can use white & black to tint our colours. We then wondered... What makes black? Students engaged in an experiment where they had the chance to separate the colour block from a marker. Students drew a black spot on filter paper, allowed the paper to hang over water, and as the filter paper drew water up into it, it separated the colours in it.

Social Studies

We've been looking at prairie landscapes this week, in particular what prairie landscapes look like, what we might see, etc.

November 6, 2015

Literacy

This week we've been looking at what a traditional story cycle and what makes up a story. We used the story The Pencil by Allan Ahlberg. It is the story of a lonely pencil who decides to start drawing and creates its own world, filled with a boy, a dog, a cat, a paintbrush and much more. Trouble comes when the pencil creates an eraser who starts to take control. But clever thinking and quick drawing bring the story back full circle.

We used this story to examine the important aspects of the story structure. We looked at the characters in story and in small groups, came up with a list of who we thought were essential to the story (as it had over 20 different characters!)

Using the story as a jumping off point to create our own short stories, student's created a list of 10 inanimate objects as character, coming up with names for them to use in story writing. We came up with the idea that the characters are important, there should be a problem, and a solution to the problem and these should be in our stories. Students then got to work in creating a plan, creating a marking guide and began writing. We'll continue with our stories next week. 

An except from the story The Pencil 

Math

This week in math we've continued to examine our counting skills, specifically being able to count between two given numbers. (counting on from 37 to 49, or 126 to 143, etc). Our grade 2 student's have also been looking at what ordinal numbers are, where we use them and practice labeling ordinal numbers to objects and people.

Lining Up to explore ordinal numbers (who is first? who is fifth? etc)

Science

We've continue to look at creating colours. We had a parent volunteer come and help us with creating gelatin discs and mixing primary colours to create secondary colours to decorate these discs. Check out some of their work.

Mixing primary colours.

Creating secondary colours in gelatine disks.

InLine Skating

We've had a great week of InLine skating with our instructor Sean. Student's really enjoyed it and you could see the growth and confidence in their InLine skills by our third session!

Roots of Empathy

We had a visit with Mrs. Watson this week where we discussed how we use visual and body language cues to discuss feelings, and what body language of babies and children can tell us. We linked our learning to a wonderful story called How Are You Peeling.

October 30, 2015

Literacy

This week in literacy we've focused on the acrostic as a poem or other way of writing, where the first letter of each line spells out a word or message. We looked at a variety of words to use to create some different acrostics. Here are a few examples:

Math

We reviewed concepts of number representation, specifically how to create tally marks to represent numbers with our grade 1, and how to draw/use base 10 blocks to represent numbers in grade 2.

Science/Social Studies

In Science this week, we've been learning about primary colours, the colour wheel, creating secondary colours and creating shades of colours.

In Social Studies we've been looking at the Meteghan and Digby region of Nova Scotia, looking at the physical geography of it as well. We connected this to an artist study of Maud Lewis, a local artist from the Digby area of Nova Scotia.

We used one of her paintings as inspiration to create our own representation of what Meteghan might be like.

Through the process, we learned how to change the shade of a colour (turning light blue to dark blue), then how we change blue to green (creating secondary colours). Feel free to pop down outside our classroom to take a look at your learners work.

Roots of Empathy

We had our first visit with baby Harper this week! We had a chance to confirm some predications we made last week about what baby Harper would be like and had a great discussions about the needs of babies and how they communicate their needs.

October 23, 2015

Literacy

This week in literacy we've been looking at how to write instructions. Last week we had a fire drill at the school and we spoke about October being Fire Safety Month. We spoke in depth about the importance of preparedness for emergencies and how fire drills help us with that. We then went on to write a set of instructions on how we evacuate the school and how we would evacuate our home in the event of a fire.

We also learned about acrostic poems, creating one about a pumpkin.

Math

This week in math we've been working on representing numbers, skip counting and using base 10 blocks.

Parents should be working with their children on skip counting concepts. 
Grade 1's should be focused on skip counting by 5's to 100. 
Grade 2's should focus on skip counting backwards by 5's and 2's.

Science

This week in science we've continue to look at concepts of colours, specifically sorting different shades of colour.

Roots of Empathy

We had our first visit with Mrs. Watson from Roots of Empathy to introduce the program to us and learn more about Baby Harper.

October 16, 2015

Literacy

This week we looked at the life cycle of a pumpkin. We wrote about the life cycle of pumpkins by putting pictures in the right order into our visual journals. Grade 1's matched the sentence to the correct picture in order.

We also looked at ways we can sort books as non-fiction and fiction. We also looked at how fiction books can be group by: picture books, chapter books, graphic novels and easy reads.

We continued on with our pumpkin theme and created some artwork of pumpkins with expressive faces.

Math

We've continued practicing counting and skip counting through the whole week. We've looked at counting on a 100-square, on a number line and using base 10 blocks. 

The children have asked to include the following links on base 10 blocks with our blog this week.

https://www-k6.thinkcentral.com/content/hsp/math/hspmath/na/gr3-5/itools_intermediate_9780547274058_/basetenblocks.html

http://www.glencoe.com/sites/common_assets/mathematics/ebook_assets/vmf/VMF-Interface.html

Science

This week we explore colours by creating a booklet about a variety of different colours.

October 9, 2015

Please note: Mrs. Thompkins had to rearrange the library this week to make the space larger for our Music teacher. We had no library this week and will resume next Wednesday. In agendas tonight you'll also find a notice for fun lunch and school pictures.

Literacy:

This week in Literacy we've examined the traditional tale. We talked about what a traditional tale is, and how through its re-telling by various authors, the story can vary. We looked at 4 versions of the the tale, The Little Red Hen. Student's really enjoyed reading and watching some different versions of this tale. We then used story-sequence cards to retell the story in order, offering our own narrative to retell the story through writing and dramatic retelling of it. The children really enjoyed this.

Sequencing and Retelling

Dramatic retelling

Exploring Literacy Centres

Math:

This week we've begun our unit on number sense. We've been practicing counting and skip counting. I sent an e-mail earlier this week about things you could do to help your child at home with counting and skip counting. If you need clarification, please contact me.

Having a game of "War" with Power of 10 cards

Science

This week we've been examining the different colours in our world. Students went on a colour hunt and found samples of colours to highlight in their visual journals.

Social Studies

This week in social, we've looked at and identified where Nunavut, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan are on the map. We've briefly talked about the history of early settlers in Nova Scotia (the Acadians) and Saskachewan (the Ukrainians).