September 30th

It was all things FALL this week in 1D.  We finally got our Fall walk in and we could not have picked a better day for it.  The colours were spectacular and the students were able to find all kinds of signs of Fall.  It got pretty muddy at times, but that just made it all the more fun. We observed the brilliant colours and shapes of the leaves, threw and jumped in the leaves, found many ladybugs finding warmth under the leaves, and found some apples ready to be picked.  Thank you to Logan's mom who joined us for the walk.

We collected leaves on our Fall walk and then we read an abundance of fall books to enhance our understanding of the season.  We read "Leaf Man", which is a book about creating animals and people out of leaves. Then we created our own leaf men and animals.  They were so cute!

We have been learning how to create sentences in Language Arts by cutting up words and arranging them in proper order, with an uppercase letter, period and correct spacing.  We do this everyday during our Animated Literacy Program.  The students expanded on this concept this week by completing a drag/drop activity on Google Drawings. Students had to select the correct word and drag it onto their page to make a sentence that made sense. They also learned how to insert an image. They had to create a sentence about their leaf man seeing something in fall.  We used the Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? story pattern to facilitate this project.  I was so impressed with the students' ability to navigate the Chromebooks - it was only their second time using them!

Our discussions about Fall continued in Science as the students brainstormed ideas about fall.  We made this anchor chart to help us remember about the season.

Our Fletcher and the Falling Leaves activity is now complete with some cute foxes and beautiful paper collage leaves that we made in Art.

We began incorporating Mindfulness into our day.  We do many activities to promote Mindfulness.  One of the activities is doing a guided meditation.  Students find their own space in the room, get comfortable and focus on their breathing.  I use a book or a website to guide the students through a meditation.  This is excellent mindfulness practice.  It calms and refocuses the children when they are moving into the "yellow zone" and gets them back into the "green zone" ready to learn again.  They really enjoy it.

Our Math focus this week was learning number words and continued tally mark practice.  We played a game where the students all had a number card.  They moved around the room to music.  When the music stopped the students had to find the matching number word card that was somewhere around the room.  Recognizing number words is really important and we will keep practicing. They then completed a cut/paste numeral and number word matching activity.

Students played a tally marks game where they had to flip a card and create the tally marks with popsicle sticks.

We continued with our Special Student sharing this week - 6 more students to go!  They are getting really good at finding words that they can read!  

  

We are about half way through our Animated Literacy program.  We are learning a new letter sound each day, completing a guided drawing and making new words and sentences everyday.  

Along with the Reading Strategies, we also learn some key spelling and word decoding strategies.  So far we have learned:

"oo" - the owly oo's, like in tooth and moon

"oo" - the punching oo's, like in book and foot

"ar" - the pirate letter,s like in car and jar

"ee" - the squealy ee's, like in tree and see

Our Terry Fox Walk sure was a wet one this year but it was all smiles regardless!  Thank you for your donations and to Logan's mom and Luciana's mom for joining us.

September 22nd

Language Arts

This week we read the story "The Fox and the Falling Leaves".  It is about a little fox who has never seen the season of Fall before.  He doesn't understand why the leaves are turning colours and falling off the tree, and he thinks the tree is sick or something is wrong. He does every kind thing possible to stop Fall from coming to the tree, but in the end he realizes that the tree is okay with losing its leaves. Through discussion, the students shared their ideas of what they would say to the tree to make it feel better.  They then tried their best to write their sentence in their writing notebooks independently.  This was their very first attempt at creating a sentence.  I was looking for them to have an uppercase at the beginning, a period at the end, and some beginning sounds - and maybe even some middle sounds - for their words.  We did a guided drawing of a fox that they used in their illustration of their writing.

We made some cute little foxes to wrap up the project.

 We are continuing to learn a letter sound each day.  This week we learned       X (Max the Ox), D (Daisy Dragon), A (Actress Annie) and T (Timmy Tiger).  Learning the sounds through the Animated Literacy program really helps the students remember the letter sound.  Each letter has a character and an action to help them remember.  We do a guided drawing with each letter to create new words and sentences.  

We learned a new reading strategy this week: Lips the Fish.  

Lips the Fish reminds us to get our lips ready for that beginning (and ending) sound in new words.  It is the starting point to sounding out words.  With that, we also started our daily word sorts.  For the next couple weeks our focus will be on beginning consonants, which give us practice using Lips the Fish.

The second reading strategy we learned this week was Eagle Eye.  This strategy reminds us to look at the pictures in a book for a clue to what the words might be.  We had fun using a magnifying glass to look at the pictures in a little mini book.  We practiced the Eagle Eye strategy when doing Read to Self this week.

Social Studies

We continued to have a Special Student each day. The students just love this activity and can't wait to find out who the Special Student will be today. Their presenting skills are improving - they especially like wearing the microphone to talk!  They are also learning how to ask really good questions to find out more about the special student.  We are able to find more and more words that we know in the guided writing. 

Students have brought in their All About Me Collages.  They are fantastic!  These give us all an understanding of what we are like as individuals.  We will soon be discussing how we fit together to make a group.

Math

It was the 10th day of school this week and with that came Zero the Hero.  He is the number that helps create new numbers after we get to 9.  Every time we have a day of school that ends with a 0, Zero the Hero will come visit and we will do some special activities. This time, we made Zero the Hero Capes and little Zero the Hero bobble heads. 

Science

We learned about the seasons cycle by reading about seasons and listening to this catchy song over and over.  Click the link so you can learn the song too, and play it in your house over and over. 

Seasons Song Link 

We created an anchor chart to use a visual clue as we work through the seasons this year, and the students created a turning seasons cycle in their notebooks.

Hopefully we can get our Fall Walk in next week so that we can do some observations and discussions about Fall.

We had lots of fun in gym this week, rotating through some locomotor stations.

We logged onto to our Chromebooks for the first time this week. This is a tricky process for the kiddos but with practice, they will become proficient at it.  We will be using Chromebooks for many things this year.  Mrs. Kloschinsky came into to do the Admirable Technology Use agreement with all students so they all know the rules about using technology at RBES.