What a week it’s been. Despite the warm weather, many of us in the Room 102 community (myself included) have been off sick this week with a nasty cough and cold. Here’s hoping that with a little rest this weekend, lots of sleep and healthy eats, we’ll be back at it next week at full speed ;)
The Terry Fox walk was on Monday and it gave us the opportunity to discuss our feelings; how did your son or daughter feel after the walk? I told students that while I did feel sad and a bit lonely because it made me think of losing my dad to cancer, it also made me feel hopeful, to see so many people raising both awareness and funds to support cancer research. Galina then read us a book How are you Peeling? that helped us identify some other emotions that we may feel from time to time. Afterwards, we played a fun game called ‘Zap’ – we walked around the circle saying “Hi my name is Kelly and I’m feeling excited” – I’d then shake hands with someone else and ‘zap’ our names and emotions would switch places! I would walk to a new person and have to say “Hi, I’m Isabelle and I’m happy”, and Isabelle would say to her new person "Hi, I'm Kelly", then it would get all zapped again! The following day Galina told us that when she came to school she was feeling really excited, because she passed a park in her local community and that reminded her that she planned on visiting it later this week. Is there any place in your local community that makes you feel something – excited, sad, confused? We had a group conversation and then wrote about our ideas in our writing journals. Here are some example of how the local community makes our students feel: - excited when they go to a restaurant, because they can order fun drinks like Shirley Temples! - sad when they pass by the funeral home, because it reminds them of the friends and family that have passed away - lonely when they see a business that their parents work at, because sometimes they have to work on the weekends We read parts of the book The World Around Us throughout the week, starting with the section all about people, as individuals. A great storybook onTumbleBooks that illustrates this big idea is Leo the Late Bloomer; we watched it as a class and then read the hard copy book to add to our Books We’ve Shared bin in class (*if you want to watch it online, email me for the TDSB password!). We then read parts about families, and wrote in our Writing Journals about the people in our families and then different types of homes we live in. Then when we moved on to the parts about our local community, we drew pictures and wrote about our ‘community helpers’ – the people who work here, the jobs they do and where they do them. To celebrate the official start of fall, we headed out into our food garden and butterfly garden on Jennings Ave to see what we could notice, using our eyes, ears, noses and hands. This inquiry led to a lot of questions – how DO the leaves change colour? How can the squirrels eat so many acorns? Where did all these wasps come from?! We’ll see if we can answer some of these questions over the coming weeks. In our Poems and Songs book this week we added Five Little Pumpkins, but the paper version of our poem was a little different than our classe’s big pocket-chart version. Ask your son or daughter if they could spot the changes! *Even if your son or daughter is an emerging reader, this activity encouraged them to look at the text of the poems, line by line, to examine each word and letter. They had a lot of fun being my editors! They also enjoyed practicing their ‘Visualizations’ again – when you close your eyes and listen to this poem, what do see in your mind? Students illustrated the poems J
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In our Room 108 Classroom Community, we foster an engaging, respectful and caring environment. I aim to balance a consistent program with flexible responsiveness to students' individual needs. Archives
November 2017
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