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.
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