We started Monday off by hearing about the students' "snapshots of winter break." Everyone had a chance to fill me in on their winter break by drawing a picture and writing a word or two about who they saw, what they ate, their favourite activity and where they went. This was a fun way to start off the morning! It sounds like everyone had a great break. I didn't take too many pictures of the drawings because they will be in our Grade 1 Memory Binders at the end of the year and we need to have some secrets!
After that we thought we'd better set some New Years Goals! We talked about setting goals that were achievable and important. This was a fun activity too!
In Language Arts, we started doing a program called "Making Words." Students collect select letter tiles each morning and work on creating 2, 3, 4 and 5 letter words. They write down these words in their notebook and after a session we go through to make sure we are making real words. There is always one mystery word that uses all of the letter cards and students really like this challenge. If they do figure it out, they have to keep it secret until I say it's okay to share! They are really quickly realizing how many words they can actually spell by putting the sounds together. They are also realizing the words they make need a vowel, and that some letters blend together better than others.
We also continued doing some word work activities practicing our Rainbow Sight Words. Next week we will be starting our Language Arts Centres and one of the centres will include working on words, which will include these types of activities.
Another rotation in our centres that we practiced every day this week was "Listening to Reading" on the Chromebooks. We used the program that I sent home information about on Monday called Raz Kids to practice this. The website and log in information is in the front of their agendas. Students logged on each day this week and by Friday all of the students could do this on their own! They really do love this program and it is a perfect opportunity to practice reading in another way. With this program students can first listen to the story, then they can read the story and last they can answer specific comprehension questions. Each child's program is set to their level (I just updated it on Thursday) so if you find that the books are getting too hard or too easy please let me know and I can adjust the level at any time. I also can log on at any time and see how each student is doing.
In Math, we continued to work on numbers to 20. We used the base 10 blocks to form numbers up to 20 and practiced this skill in our work books and journals.
In gym we are focusing on balancing, movement and rolls as the start of our gymnastics unit. The gym is set up in centres so we can have small groups of children working on all different types of balancing, movements and rolls.
In Science, we started our Winter Unit with looking at the different things we already know about winter. We know a lot!!
We reviewed the 4 seasons by doing a clothing sort of the seasons, and a temperature, weather and month sort of the seasons. We also invited 1A up to our room for some winter centres Friday morning which included playing in snow, making snowflakes, decorating snowmen, a math skip counting snowman game, and some I spy activities. We had a lot of fun together! Next week we are on to learning about the 5 senses!
In Social, we started the topic of "my Community." We are going to be learning about a few different types of communities but more specifically the different aspects of our community right here in Devon. I love this unit, so I have a couple cool projects planned. These include mapping out our town, writing to our pen pals about why they should move to Devon and a Community Scrapbook that we will make together.
One of the best projects we did this week was our Snowman Melted writing. First we used shaving cream, glue and a bit of sparkle to make a big pile of "melted" snow with our hands. Of course this was a big hit and while the snow was drying we had to write down how they thought their snowman actually melted. They had a lot of interesting ideas and were excited to get them down on paper! Check them out here! Look at their spelling!!! After writing down all their ideas, they had to pick one to showcase with their snowman!
Of course when we had the shaving cream out we had to practice our sight words too!
Thomas turned 7 on Thursday and we had a blast celebrating with him!
We have another busy week next week so please read the email to check dates and supplies needed.
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