Week 10 - November 10th, 2018

Well, November has started with a bang!  We have had a great week full of learning, for both me and the students.  I was at a workshop on Tuesday called "Empowering Writers" and I'm excited to start implementing it into our weekly writing program this year.

We have been doing so much work with our word families this week.  We finished the AT family and moved onto the AG and AP families.  Students have been practising making these words with letter tiles, spelling these words and matching them to pictures, reading them in stories, and searching for these words in word searches.  They are teaching the students about decoding words.  These word family words can easily be decoded by sounding out each letter sound, and we want beginning readers to sound out each sound to figure out words, rather than to memorize and guess.  The new books that we are using have no pictures so students are "forced" to sound out the words.  When reading with your child at home please remember to encourage them to use their "stretchy snake" reading strategy.  This will be a big focus of our Language Arts Program for the month of November.   I only had the chance to read with about half of the class this week and many students moved up a level in their reading books.  I will get to the rest of the class next week for sure.  Please remember to continue reading 15 minutes every night at home.  I can teach the students the strategies at school but I need the support from you at home to give them the practice each night.  Thank you to those of you who are doing this, it makes a real difference.

In writing this week we have been focusing on knowing that we can spell words on our own.  You will notice that as work comes home, I am not going to be correcting their spelling.  If students can re-read me what they wrote then I won't usually correct it.  Often students know the beginning and ending sounds of words and we have been practicing those middle vowel sounds so the words really will come.  You will see students range greatly with these skills and that is totally fine.  The main focus is to get them writing and confident to try spelling words on their own and I promise it will come!

 We read the book, The Peace Book, By Todd Parr yesterday and students came up with this writing.

We continued our colour unit with a couple other cool projects.  We had the "Tech Guy" in from Blackgold on Friday to show us how to work with Google Drawings, students learned all about opening tabs, the "undo" button or the eyebrow, how to minimize, how to make things large screen, they also learned the bunny tap, and the home button.  It was a great session and I think we all feel a bit more confident in using Chromebooks as a class.  Student made their own Colour Wheel's on the Chromebooks where they had to make their own shapes, fill those shapes with the correct colours and then label the colours.  They are getting so good with their colour words!

We also drew pictures of objects of each colour in nature, as well as made our own favourite coloured crayon.

In Social this week, students had a chance to present to the class about their family tree home project.  Students shared some interesting facts about their family and what made their family unique, special and different.  That line was the focus of our next activity as we made family houses.  Students first drew a picture of their family and then attached it to the photo that you sent in.  We talked about how all families are different and not one looked the same!

In Math we had yet another visit from Zero the Hero on the 40th day of school.  He left us a fun dice game where we had to roll two dice and colour the number it added up to on the paper.  The numbers were shown in a variety of ways, dots, number words, tally marks and numerals.  And then of course he left some Halloween Smarties for us to pattern with and eat.

We also finished off our Pattern unit with reading the Story "Elmer."  It is a story about an Elephant who is different.  Students then got to practice extending a repeating pattern, and labeling the pattern.  Students also had the chance to name their Elephant.

We had a great discussion about Remembrance Day yesterday and participated in the school ceremony.  Thomas's family sent us in some stories of his Grandpa's time in the war, and we shared a story about what it would be like to have a family member have to go to war.  

We also had to decorate the front foyer of the school with Remembrance Day art, so we worked on this project with our Grade 4 Buddies!  

We celebrated a birthday this week in 1B for Priya.  She brought in cupcakes for the students to enjoy!

Korie was also our student of the week last Friday!  Korie is a dedicated student who tries hard with every task she does.  She is also a genuine friend and is kind to all the students in our class.  Way to go Korie!

Thomas was also asked to carry the Wreath for the School at the schools Remembrance Day Ceremony.  He did an excellent job taking his work very seriously.