Christmas is HERE! - December 31st!

Here are a few pictures from this week!

Layton and Kailynn celebrated birthdays this week!

Kailynn was our student of the WEEK!  She is one of the kindest girls I know!  She is thoughtful and full of fun!!

Merry Christmas 1B!!!

We had a lot of fun this week!  We read the GingerBread Baby and did quite a few activities with this book, we sequenced it, we talked about the problem, setting and characters, we designed our own Gingerbread Baby and did some GingerBread Centres. 

We loved our Fort Building and PJ Day!

We also found some time to write pen pal letters back to our friends in Grimshaw! 

We also learned with a new coding toy this week, called BeeBots.  They are little Robots that students can program to move in certain areas.  They coded with patterned cards to make the robots find certain shapes, they also used the cards to make the robot go to certain places on a map, and to find their home.  These were a fun addition to our room this week!  

We had our fun Craft Afternoon with the Grade 4s!  Thank you to Ryan's mom who came to help!

We also finished off our Trip around the World learning about Christmas Traditions.  We had a special readers theatre of the Polar Express by a Grade 3 group to finish up the project!  

We had a great week! 

Happy New Year!  See you all in a Week! 

Week 15 - December 16th, 2018

Here is a quick update on last weeks activities.

This is a picture of our Star Art we made for the Christmas Concerts!  We cut our stars from cardboard and used rulers to make straight lines on the stars.  After the lines were there we used a hot glue gun to make the lines 3D.  Once the lines were made of hot glue we wrapped the stars in tinfoil and coloured the tinfoil with sharpies.  They turned out very cool with lots of sparkly colours.  We have a volunteer coming into our class a few times a week now to read and work with students.  Her name is Mrs Rupp, so if you hear the students talk about her, you will know who she is!  She is a Teacher who wants to get back into the classroom a bit more and thought a good place to start would be volunteering and we are excited to have her!

The highlight of my week was hearing and talking all about our Family's Christmas Traditions.  The students did a great job presenting to the class as well as fielding a bunch of questions from their classmates.  We worked hard at focusing our questions on the topic, and making sure we were not making statements about ourselves instead asking questions only related to our Christmas Traditions.  

We even had a snack from the Ukraine which was a big hit!

This week we travelled to Hawaii, Mexico, Germany, Sweden and Holland.  We learned how to say Merry Christmas in these different languages and we also learned what special Christmas item originated in that Country. We are learning that Canada has adopted many traditions from other countries.  Students are loving this project and most mornings they are asking me when we will be going for our trip of the day.  We have a few more destinations this week and hopefully by Friday we will make it back safely to the North Pole on the Polar Express. 

 Ava just got back from Hawaii so she was even able to teach us the dance that went along with the song Mele Kalikimaka!

In Math we continued our numbers to 20 unit.  The students are getting really ready for addition now too.  It is so interesting for me to see them develop their number sense as we move onto numbers that are higher than 10.  They begin to see patterns with numbers and begin to see how other numbers can make up new numbers.  We learned the Great Snowman Race dice game this week and students loved it!  They rolled two dice, added the numbers up and moved their marker that many spaces.  If they hit a snowman space they jumped up 10 spaces but if they hit a snow storm they bounced back 5!  It was a big hit in the room!

Another highlight was receiving a letter BACK from Santa!  Santa wrote each of our names on his letter, and sent us a package of sunflower seeds for us to plant next Spring during our Plant and Animal Unit.  He said that everyone in our class was on the nice list.  They quickly noticed that my name wasn't on the list and they drew many conclusions on why that might be.  

It was a busy week for mail in 1B because we also got a letter back from our pen pals up in Grimshaw, Alberta!  They sent us a picture of themselves and a note telling us a bit more about them.  We hope to have time this week to write back but we will have to see how the week goes.  Students took turns reading their letters to the class as well as to their partners.  The letters were great motivation for the students to want to sound out and figure out each word and sentence and the students did an excellent job reading out their letters!  

For our final Owl Project we used pastels and drew the shape of a white owl on black paper.  Students then had to use bright colours to fill in the spaces that they drew.  They turned out great!  

Please take some time to read the email I send out this week too, as there are many important events happening throughout the week and I don't want anyone to miss something important!  

Congratulations to this week's Student of the Week, Kaci!  

Kaci is doing so well in Grade 1!  She has a kind and caring attitude and never lets anyone feel left out!  She is working so hard on her reading and her hard work is paying off.  She is a reading superstar!

Week 13-14 December 7th, 2018

Here is an update on what we have been working on these days.  There is never a dull moment around here but you can be sure we are always learning!

We finished up our science Colour unit this week with a couple science experiments. We took some observations and made some conclusions.   We also wrote in our Science Journal a summary of all the things we remember about colour.

We worked on a couple different art projects over the last two weeks.  One was a collaborative art project where students worked in partners to make shooting stars.  The had to cut out tracers and work with one another to hold the star in place as they drew around it with chalk and spread the chalk out around the tracer.  They were very happy with the end result.  

We continued with our Owl topic too, doing so many cool things.  We finished off our information booklet, with all the owl vocabulary that we learned.  Students wrote definitions and drew pictures to remind them about all these tricky words.  

We read the story Owl Babies and used it for inspiration for our next art project...

And then as a summary we wrote a paragraph and students needed to include anything they knew about owls.  We used this project to learn about a "rough draft" and a good copy.  It was quite the process but we worked on making sure our sight words were spelled correctly and we sounded out anything else.  If students could read me back what they wrote no changes were made to their spelling.    Students also had to remember to use capital letters, periods and finger spaces.  Grade 1 is hard work but we are getting into the groove of things now!  I don't want to post too many pictures of the owl books because the students are very excited to read and share them at home with you!  We will also be sharing them around the school next week.  They are OWL EXPERTS!!!

In other areas of Language Arts students are getting so good at our daily language arts routine.  Students are very excited about reading and we love hearing one another read.  It is a pretty exciting time for the Grade 1's as we see them really making progress in their reading and fluency.  No one gets more excited than me as we hear students read out loud with confidence!  

I'm sure you have all heard about our recent "TRIP."  We prepared for a few days this week by making suit cases, passports and scrapbooks and today we loaded the train to our first stop in our own Country of Canada.  Next week we will be boarding the plane to Hawaii, Germany, Mexico and a few others.  We are also excited to hear about your family Christmas Traditions next week.  

We also wrote a quick letter to Santa.  We didn't ask for any toys though, we just told him a few things about ourselves.  We will see if he has time to write back!  

In Math we have been focusing on numbers to 20, working on the terms greater than, less than and equal too.  We have been working on number lines and with 100's charts to develop our number sense.  Students have been working on skip counting.  We have also really been talking about numbers that are one or two more than another and one or two less!  We love Math in 1B!  

We collected over 200 items for the Christmas Elves Project this week.  We sorted our items in groups of 2's, 5's and 10's and practised counting them!  Way to go 1B Families, that is a lot of donations! 

Everyone did an excellent job at the Christmas Concerts!  Thank you to everyone for coming out!  

Enjoy the long weekend!  I'm headed to Cochrane for a Ringette Tournament so I will see everyone Monday!