Language
Daily 5 is awesome J We’ve focused a lot on Word Work and Word Work Games over the past few weeks. Students are using what they know about the ‘at’ and the ‘ing’ families to create new words – that fat cat was singing! With volunteers, they’re playing Tic, Tac, Toe, Go Fish and Sight Word Uno with the Dolch Word List Words. You can play games at home too! Visit this site Halloween Glyphs: Glyphs are often theme-related and artistic. Once they’re completed, the picture can then be compared to the glyph’s legend (it tells what each shape, colour, number etc. stands for) to help you get information about the person who created the glyph. When you come for interviews please be sure to check out the pumpkins on the wall! *This activity was used for Oral Language – how well were the students able to listen to the oral instructions, process the information and then create the artistic output? Some read-alouds we’ve shared recently: Cinderhazel: The Cinderella of Halloween (we did a class Venn, comparing both of the characters!), Diwali,Light’s for Gita (both read for our study on Changing Family Traditions and Celebrations), Somewhere Today: A Book of Peace, The Peace Book, A Bear in War (all on the theme of Remembrance Day) Social Studies Scavenger Hunt: Kendra created a cross-curricular activity for the kids; as a team, they had to decide on roles (Reader, Hunter, Recorder, Checker) and then find hidden Snap Cube Pattern Trains around the room. So for example, The Reader would read “Find an AB pattern near the couch”, the Hunter would go to find it and report back the colours of the pattern, then the Recorder would colour the train and the Checker would edit and double-check to see if the right colours were used! Ask your son or daughter which role they played and what their responsibilities were! As an assessment task, students are creating Flip Books to show the differences between roles and responsibilities. They each have three roles: son/daughter, student, friend – what are some of the different responsibilities that come with each role and who is affected by your choices? This past month, we’ve started to focus on another strand in the curriculum, “Changing Family and Community Traditions”. It was so great to read about and hear students talk about (part of their Oral Language strand) their Thanksgiving family traditions and how they have changed over the years. Thanks to all who did their homework Math We collected so many coins for the Change for Change coin drive!! Way to go! We had to do some problem solving though; how would the Toronto Foundation for Student Success be able to count them all?! Someone came up with the great idea – we should SORT the coins for them! It would be easier to count if all the ‘like’ coins were grouped together ;) Real Life sorting at it’s best. Once the coins were sorted (pennies, nickels, dimes etc.) the students used some hundreds charts to do preliminary counting – we counted the nickels and practiced skip counting by 5s!! (skip counting is also a form of growing patterns for grade 2s; the # grows by 5 each time). Our Halloween math was also a lot of fun; the grade 2s worked a lot with real-life pumpkin seeds to create growing patterns and the grade 1s worked with foam shapes (witches, bats, ghosts) to create repeating patterns. Other Report & Learning Skills: We’ve been talking a lot about the expectations of our classroom program and I introduced students to the six learning skills: Responsibility, Organization, Independent Work, Collaboration, Initiative and Self-Regulation. We had many class discussions about all these big words and broke them down into easy to understand, real-life, grade 1 and grade 2 examples. When you come for interviews, check out the student’s cooperative learning! Also, most days after Daily 5, the students are asked “How did you use your learning skills this morning?” and most of them have some great, concrete examples! So, instead of asking your child “How was school today” – ask them WHAT LEARNING SKILL DID YOU USE MOST TODAY?! Flat Stanley & Stanley: Flat Again Students are having a blast listening to our Flat Stanley read aloud series J Take a look at his interactive website and the Just For Kids page!! Halloween: It was so much fun to see the students in their costumes! Kendra and I were a mouse and a giant cookie! Rather than Daily 5 that day, students worked on a Halloween packet, full of Number Sense, Reading and Writing activities. It was just for extra practice and fun! Check out the booklet when your son or daughter brings it home :)
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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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