September 28th

 Fall is definitely here.  Dare I say that we may even miss it and go straight to winter?  Let's hope not!  This week our fall story was Fletcher and the Falling Leaves.  This is a sweet story about a young fox who sees the season of fall for the first time.  He is very concerned for the tree, who is losing his leaves quickly.  Fletcher does not understand what is happening and tries his best to console the tree.  In the end, he realizes that the tree naturally loses its leaves the in fall and can still be just as beautiful without the leaves.  The students contributed their ideas of what they would say to the tree to comfort the tree.

 Then, in their first true writing attempt, they wrote a sentence in their writing notebooks.  The focus was on:

1) starting with an uppercase letter 

2) using fingers spaces between words

3) trying to spell a word by stretching out the sounds OR at least writing the beginning sound

4) putting a period at the end of the sentence.

 

Some students were able to do this activity on their own and others required one-on-one support.  Either way, each student put in a great effort and was able to complete the task.

We learned how to draw a fox!  

We put the fox into a layered fall scene.

The students got to experiment with watercolour painting.

 We are doing many activities in math that centre around number sense. Our focus has been counting using one-to-one correspondence and "instantly seeing how many" (called subitizing) when shown a picture of dots or in a 10 frame or on a card.  To facilitate this, we had four centres that we rotated through:

1) 10 Frame Memory

2) Tally Card Match Up (from last week)

3) Domino Pip Counting & Matching to Cards

4) Clockominoes

We got on the Chromebooks again this week.  Students are getting quicker at logging on.  We are getting used to where the letters and numbers are on the keyboard by using Typing Club.  We also went on the Bookflix site to listen to reading. 

You can get familiar with the BGSD Engaging Student website at home with your child, too.  If you click on the Grade One icon, you will discover all sorts of great games and activities for each subject area.  You can also finding Engaging Students on this blog under the Great Websites tab.  

For those of you supporting your child at home with by practicing the Animated Literacy alphabet, this week learned S, R, J, R, K.

 Thank you for sending in all the coloured items!  We were able to start our colour wheel this week.

Our Terry Fox Walk was a big success, even in the cold weather.  Thank you for all your donations! 

 

September 16th

OH MY GOODNESS!  It was such an exciting day on Monday and the students were all a-buzz because it was the 10th day of school.  A special superhero visited our classroom when the students weren't there on the weekend and left us a special note and treat.  It was ZERO THE HERO!!  He came to teach us all about the importance of the number 0.  He will visit us every 10 days until the 100th day of school. We used the Cheerios he left us to practice our one-to-one counting skills and to practice showing numbers in our 10 Frames.  We had a big lesson on Tallying, too.  Our other fun Zero the Hero activities included making a Zero the Hero mask with 10 stickers (that we will add to every 10 days) and making a cute Zero the Hero puppet.

Counting by using one-to-one correspondence

Showing numbers from 0 to 10 in a 10 Frame

We read The Story of Zero the Hero, which explains why 0 is so important....When we run out of numbers in each group of ten, we call upon Zero the Hero to come and help make a new number....like when we get to 19, Zero the Hero helps us make 20. When we get to 39, Zero the Hero helps us make 40, etc.

Our Zero the Hero sticker masks turned out to be 'super' cool!

Our Zero the Hero puppets with 'bobble' heads for the 10th day of school.

  

We learned this little verse and read this cool story to help use understand how to make tally marks.  The students caught on to this concept quickly when we did some fun tally marks centres.

Here we have Ty and Kayleb showing how to build tallies.

In Language Arts, we continued with our Letter-a-Day and our daily Special Person. The Animated Literacy letters and characters we learned this week were A, D, T & X.  Ask your child about these sounds and actions.

We began our Words Their Way word sorts this week as well.  Words Their Way is a spelling and phonics program which follows the five stages of spelling development.  Our focus for the next few weeks is beginning sounds.  After generating many words that start with the chosen beginning consonants, and playing a fun object sorting game, the students then cut and sort a set of picture cards according to their beginning sound.  We do this daily and combine it with other sorting activities. 

Our letters this week were B, S, R & M.

 Every day we sing our beginning consonant song.

Zippity zoo zah, zippity zay,

My oh my, what a wonderful day.

Plenty of sunshine heading my way,

Zippity zoo zah, zippity zay.

Each time we sing the song, a student chooses a new consonant from the bag and we sing the song again but this time we sing it with all the beginning sounds changed.  For example, if the student pulls out an N, it would go like this:

Nippity noo nah, nippity nay,

My oh my what a wonderful day.

Plenty of sunshine heading my way,

Nippity noo nah, nippity nay.

The kids absolutely love hearing all the silly beginning sounds!

As part of our review of our letters and sounds, we have been doing a lot of 'play' with the alphabet.  Centres included building the alphabet with wiki stix, Lego and playdough, as well as matching upper and lower case letters with the letters stones, magnet letters, keys and locks, and a memory game.