Week 4 - September 28th, 2018

Well, that's another week in the books!

We have been busy continuing our interviews and writing about our special students each day.  Next week we have three more to do and our book will be complete.  We will practice reading it in class and then I will send them home for you to see.  Their drawings are getting considerably better as the month goes on and so is their printing.

We continue to do daily printing practice in class as well.  Students are realizing that Mrs. Dupont needs to see them writing on the line, and remembering those important finger spaces in between words.  It's a process but I am pleased with how each student tries their very best.

We finished our Fall Season unit this week.  We did a journal entry in our Science book, we made a big class chart, and each student had a chance to talk to me, one on one, about what they learned about Fall over the last two weeks!  They know a lot!

One of our favorite projects this week was our Leaf Men and Leaf Animals.  I took pictures of all the Leaf Men and will put them in a class book for us to read in our library.

Aren't they cute?  After they made a Leaf Man, they made any animal they wanted to, those turned out great as well.  The book will be similar to Brown Bear, Brown Bear; Leaf Man, Leaf Man, What Do You See?

In Math, we finished off our numbers to 10 journal entries and continued to work on numbering, sorting, counting on, tally marks and tens frames.

Next week we will start off on some sorting activities and we might even get to patterning.  These guys love Math and are quite competent with their numbers!

Our Fall Walk was a blast!

 Mrs. Fleming said I had excellent listeners all day on Friday.  She said most of the students really enjoyed the Terry Fox Walk.  We did a couple of discussions this week about Terry Fox and the difference between a real hero and a super hero.  The kids couldn't believe Terry Fox made that run with only one leg!

We have completed 1/2 of our Animated Literacy characters and next week I will assess each student to see if they are remembering the new sounds.  These letter sounds are critical for reading so we need to make sure each student knows what sound each letter makes.  Some students already know all the sounds so they are putting words together during this letter time.  I will send home a colouring book next week with each letter and action so you can practice at home.  But remember we have just made it half way so they likely won't know the sounds for the last half of the book yet.

Right after Thanksgiving we will be starting our sight word and Home Reading Program.  Watch for information letters about these things next week in your child's mail bag. We made reading sticks this week out of popsicle sticks and googly eyes, then we worked all week on pointing to each word we "read", starting at the beginning of each page and looking at each word before flipping the pages and looking at pictures.  These Grade 1's are getting excited about reading!

Our new reading strategy and reading buddy this week is called Lips the Fish-  Lips the Fish helps us get our moths ready to say the correct beginning sound of each word.  Students love these little characters.  

Enjoy the weekend!

Week 3 - September 22, 2018

We interviewed another group of students this week.  These kids are getting so great at asking questions, presenting to the whole group, and drawing using details.

We started some very important pre-reading activities this week.  One activity is a word sort.  Students have to sort pictures of words with the same beginning sound.  Each day during the week they do the sort a little differently, but by the end of the week they are very good at distinguishing those beginning sounds.  Every Friday we still send the word sort home for you to try on the weekend too.  Please keep the word sorts at home once they come home on Friday. 

We also do some phonemic awareness listening games every day.  Students work on rhyming words, counting words in a sentence, beginning, middle and ending sounds, as well as breaking words apart.  These all are very important skills to have as they start reading and deciphering new words. 

We continued with our printing program this week.  Students are learning the difference between turtle letters (letters that stay under the dotted line), worm letters (letters that go below the bottom line) and giraffe letters ( letters that take up the whole line space, top line to bottom line).  I have already seen a marked improvement in their daily agenda writing and their special person writing.  Also remember that this is a process and students will pick up these skills at different rates.  It is more important to me that they are successful writers right now, rather than neat ones! 


In Math we continue our numbers to 10 unit.   We are counting objects, sorting objects, lining up objects and still working on the many ways we can show a number.  This week we really worked on the tens frame and tally marks. 

Also in Math, on the 10th day of school we had a special visitor sneak into the classroom and leave some activities to teach us about the power of a ZERO.  He can attach to any number and he starts the number sequence over again!  Zero the Hero has a very important job, and as we count to the 100th day of school he will visit our classroom every 10 days. 

In gym we are doing locomotion stations!  Very fun!

Since the Fall Walk was cancelled we were invited to 1A to explore some Fall Centres and we read the book Fletcher and the Falling Leaves.  It is about a little Fox who is having a hard time understanding why the leaves are all falling off the trees and he  tries his best to keep at least one leaf for this tree.  After holding onto the tree's last leaf it of course falls off.  After the story we worked on creating our own special fall leaves.  Students had to have a lot of patience for this project as they ripped small pieces of construction paper to glue on their special leaf.  They turned out so pretty and will be hanging from our roof for a few days.    We are also learning the 4 seasons cycle, and about the many other characteristics of fall. 

We also learned how to log on and off of the Chromebooks this week.  Some Grade 4 students came to help us get the hang of doing it, and on Thursday we logged on by ourselves.  Students need to become proficient at logging on so we can use the Chromebooks for a few activities throughout the year.  We will continue to practice this skill along with doing some typing practice over the months of September and October. 

We continued learning a new letter every day this week through our Animated Literacy Program.  Students should now know the letters, D, A, M, T.  They can show you the action and the sound that each letter makes. 

We were word detectives this week with our silent reading.  Students used magnifying glasses when they were reading to start really looking for words that they know.  We also learned about one of our reading buddies, Eagle Eye, who helps remind us to look at the pictures when we are reading and trying to learn new words.  Pictures can often give us a clue. 

I think that's enough for this week! 

Week 2 - September 14th

Well that was a fun week!  We are really getting used to the Grade 1 routine and are right into the swing of learning new things.  This week we started interviewing one student a day for our class book using the All About Me Bags.  Students are excited to share their special objects and we work together to write a page for each student on our chart paper.  Already the students are recognizing many common sight words.  After we read their story and write some of the story in our book, students get to draw a picture of their friends in their Grade 1 Book.  Once the book is done, they will get to bring it home and read their class book to you.

We started Animated Literacy this week too.  This is a program that our whole Grade 1 team uses to teach the letters and sounds of the alphabet.  Each letter has an action, character and song and we spend a good part of our morning doing work with each letter.  So far if you ask your children, they should be able to tell you the sounds for P, U, O, and M.  We don't learn the letters in order, but as soon as we have the letters for some words we start to spell and draw.  This week we drew a picture of a PUP, POP(dad), and MOM.  They are very proud of their spelling, drawing and writing..

In math we are learning about all the ways we can show a number and some cool fun math games.  We are learning the numbers and number words, we are learning how to order numbers and we are learning how to match numbers using a variety of materials.  

Every day from 2:00-2:15 we have a time we call Healthy Hearts where we get up and move our bodies in some way! This week we tried out yoga, Go Noodle, and of course a little secret recess.  

Enjoy the weekend!