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!