Week 8 - October 27th, 2018

Another full week in 1B.  I appreciated everyone coming to Parent Teacher Interviews this week! It really means a lot to me that I had 100% attendance!  I know how important your child's Grade 1 year is and I now know that I have a great group of parents supporting their child at home too! Together we can accomplish a lot!!

Just a few highlights from this week!

In Math, we are quickly becoming pattern masters and are almost finished up our whole unit! Everyone in our class is able to design their own pattern, label the pattern, and write the pattern rule!  We love Patterns!

Pattern Worms were a big hit on Friday!

In Language Arts we worked really hard this week at reading,,, we worked at pointing to each individual word and remembering our Lips the Fish strategy who reminds us to get our mouths ready to say the beginning sounds for each and every word we read.

We practiced our Stretchy Snake strategy as well, saying out loud every sound that we see in each word.  We practiced this with some three letter word cards this week.  Students had to identify beginning, middle and ending sounds.  Students were writing these words as well.  They are so excited to spell new words!  Grade 1 is seriously awesome!

Also in Language Arts we are reviewing each letter sound with our Tongue Twister Book.  Students have to read the tongue twister and work independently to colour each object that begins with the correct beginning sound.

We also learned two other parts of our Daily 5 routine.  We already know how to Read to our Self, but this week we learned about Reading to Someone and Word Work. For Read to Someone students choose a partner and sit elbow to elbow and knee to knee taking turns reading books to one another.  For Word Work we are doing a variety of activities practicing our sight words and other easy to read Grade 1 words.

We finished off our Big Pumpkin study, with drawing and writing about our favourite part of the story!

In Art we made our very own Big Pumpkin which of course was a very big hit.  It was funny though, the whole school ran out of orange paint so I thought the project might be ruined but quickly the Grade 1's came up with the idea of mixing paint to get the colour we needed.  They knew that orange was a secondary colour so we just needed to mix red and yellow to get orange!  And that is what we did!

On the Chromebooks, a couple times a week, we have been working on a typing program and a reading program.  Once we get really good at logging on and off I will use the Chromebooks for one of our Language Arts Centres.

Enjoy the weekend!

Just a reminder that I still need family pictures sent in by Monday.  I am hopeful that we can do the project on Monday!

The Family Tree Project can be sent it anytime now, and as they come in students will get a chance to talk about their family with the class. Have the students draw the pictures and you can help them write the names.  There is no right or wrong way to do the project, just as long as you do it with your child.  We will keep these family trees in our memory binders for the end of the year.

We also had a cool presentation this week from Earth Rangers.  They are a group that come to talk to kids about what they can do to help protect the planet!  They brought in some pretty interesting animals, and we had the front row!  Very exciting!  

Respect Assembly Video

Congratulations to our Student of the Week Thomas!  He is a dedicated Grade 1 student who does his best work with every task!  Keep up the great work Thomas!  1B is lucky to have Thomas in our room!!

Week 7 - October 19th, 2018

Hi There!  It was a fun but short week this week in 1B!  We continued work on our Colour Wheel project which has been a huge hit.  We have been talking about primary and secondary colors, and soon we will get to do some real color mixing in class.  Students were excited each day to bring in their many coloured items.  Doesn't it look awesome!

In gym we have been working on throwing and aiming.  This week the gym had target practice stations and fitness challenges.

In Math we continued our patterns unit and had another visit from Zero The Hero.  He left us a few projects: for one we had to make a pumpkin out of 30 pieces of orange paper, and the other was 30 Fruit Loops that he gave specific instructions to make patterns with.  Students also started to learn about counting by 2, 5 and 10 as we sorted and grouped the Fruit Loops.

In our pattern unit we learned how to label a pattern and write down the pattern rule.

In Language Arts we finished all the Alphabet Letters in the Animated Literacy program.  Next week students will come home with a book to show you each sound and action that they have learned.  When reading with your children, remind students to look at the letters and match them to the sound. Start with the beginning sounds of words.  We don't want students memorizing the books we want students to look at each word and decode each of the sounds.  They are very good at remembering those sounds when they think about the characters and actions. 

We will continue to learn a few more letter blend combinations and common vowel sounds through this program going forward. 

This week we also started a project with the book Big Pumpkin.  We have read the story a few times together and did some work with the setting of a story, characters in a story and the problem of the story.  This helps with the reading comprehension and is important in understanding or increasing the children's book knowledge.   Next week we will be working on noting what happens in the beginning, middle and end of a story, sequencing a story and reenacting a story.  So much fun!

Thursday we had our first Science Day where students painted with natural materials, learned about making colours lighter and darker, they learned the difference between transparent and opaque, as well as how to transfer colour onto fabric (with tie dying).

We did an awesome Art Project this week with the primary colours.  Piet Mondrain uses shapes and primary colours to make works of art, and that's what we did too!  

This week on October 26th, our class will be presenting a special video that we made with the Grade 4's teaching the school a little bit more about Respect.  I will share the video after it has made it's first debut at the assembly.  Please feel free to come to the assembly and watch if you have the time.  Here are a few pictures of the process!

A very special Happy Birthday to Kris!  We love having Kris in 1B!

Week 6 - October 13, 2018

We have started our new Patterns Unit in Math this week.  Students learned what a pattern is (a sequence that repeats itself), how to label a pattern with letters, and what the core of a pattern is (the smallest part of the pattern that repeats itself).  We will practice these skills next week too, but for now there are patterns EVERYWHERE in 1B!!!

We continued our daily letter work this week and students are getting so good at using stretchy snake to sound out new words every day.  We are sounding out these new words and also writing new words every day.  We have all been practicing our sight words!  We continue our daily printing practice and have started some work with tongue twisters to help reinforce students really thinking about those beginning sounds of words.  Each day I read with a new group of students and I am really impressed with how excited they are about reading!  Some are still a little cautious and don't think they can do it, but we are focusing on sounding out the beginning sounds of words, using our finger to point to every word as we read it and trying our very best! Please remember to sign the Calendar Page in the agenda every night you read at home with your child.  After 20 nights of reading in a month, we will add a surprise to our class year end party.  Speaking of parties, I am still thinking about how to run the Halloween Party this year, so more details will follow.

In Science, you all know about our work with colours.  Students love our class colour wheel and are excited to show me their coloured objects each morning.  We will do some work with primary colours on Monday and then Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we will ask for some secondary colours to be brought in.

In Social, we have been focusing on what it means to belong to a group.  Right now we are focusing on our class group of 1B.  We talked about why each member of our group is important, we talked about rules for our group, and this week decided on our class colour and mascot.  We had a lesson on democracy and voting as students brainstormed ideas and then had the difficult decision of only choosing one thing to vote on.  We voted and we are now the Blue and Purple 1B Cheetahs.  On Friday we designed our own class flag.  Next week we will start to talk about another important group,  our families.  I will be asking for a 4x6 family picture to be sent it later next week so keep an eye out for one of those!

In Phys. Ed we have been focusing on underhand throwing and aiming.  Students are getting really great at this skill. 

Huge congratulations to this weeks Student of the Week Bently!  We love having Bently in 1B!  He is a hard worker and is always on task!  He jumps up to help the students and Teacher in our class!