October 25th

We did a book focus this week on the fun Halloween story Big Pumpkin. You can watch the story HERE on Youtube.  This is one of my favourite Halloween stories.  It lends itself nicely to introducing the students to the elements of a story. As well, it is an easy story to do a retell in the form of a reader's theatre.  We had so much fun with this!

Before we read the story, the students used their prediction skills to guess which character was going to be able to pull out the pumpkin. We created a graph.  Once we read the story, they all found out that they guessed wrong - all the characters worked together to pull out the pumpkin!

After reading the story to the children, I introduced the READING ROPE.  This is a tool that we will use all year to help us identify the parts of the story: 

House = Setting 

Kids =  Characters 

Knot = Problem,

Bow = Problem Solved 

B, M, E = Beginning, Middle, End

Students completed their page about the setting and the characters.

We sequenced the story and discussed where the beginning was, where the middle started, and what happened in the end.

We had so much fun retelling the story by doing a reader's theatre! Everyone had a role and some lines and they did such a good job with the voices of the characters.  Even the audience had some lines to say!

The characters are laughing at the bat because the bat was small and they didn't think he could help at all. But the bat had an idea - let't pull the pumpkin out together!

Here is a quick video of the characters working together to pull out the pumpkin.

At the very end of it all, the students drew about what their 

favourite part of the story was.

We did some pumpkin writing and used a predictable chart to help us write a sentence:

We discussed and watched a really neat video about the life cycle of a pumpkin, which you can view HERE.  Then we drew to show the life cycle.

We worked with our sight words and created sentences about pumpkins:

The students were introduced to the second component of Daily 5: Word Work.  This is when the students have a chance to practice the new words they are reading (sight word practice).  They do all sorts of centres that related to letters and words, such as making words with playdough, magnets, salt trays, wiki stix, Boogie Boards, rainbow writing, stamping, and more.   This is usually one of the students' favourite parts of the Daily 5 because it is very interactive.

Here is a sneak peek at our awesome Christmas card art we made for the RBES Christmas Card Fundraiser.  They were so careful with the painting and did SUCH a fantastic job!

October 11th

Our Fall Walk was a big success!  We were a little worried that we missed all the wonderful leaves, but once we got into the river valley, we found so many signs of fall.  The weather cooperated and we were actually hot by the time we got to the playground. Students observed the colour changes, the smells, and the noises of fall. One of the biggest hits were all the ladybugs the students found keeping warm underneath the leaves.  We had apples and granola bars as our snack - we were so hungry! - and we had a chance to play at the playground in the warm sunshine.

 

 When we got back from our walk, we read the beautiful story called Leaf Man.  The book shows many different creations of animals using leaves.  The students completed a Google Drawings activity, which was based on Leaf Man and the patterns in Brown, Brown Bear, What Do You See?  The task was to order the words of a sentence to match the pre-given sentence by using sentence knowledge and Chromebook skills.  Students also learned how to insert photos.  They chose three fall photos that their Leaf Man was seeing and inserted them into their document. 

Students got to create a Leaf Man and a Leaf Animal.  They are so cute!

Students examined various leaves that they collected and them drew them in their Science Journals, along with other illustrations of what happens in fall.   

 

 

We read some beautiful books about Thanksgiving, which sparked lots of discussion about what we are thankful for.  The students wrote in their writing notebooks about what they are thankful for.  

 The story called I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie was a great Thanksgiving story to sequence and have fun with.  Students got to feed the old lady food through a hole in her mouth (Kleenex box), as they learned the sequence of the story.  They also completed a writing activity and read their sentences to the class.

In Math this week our focus was on number lines, putting numbers in order and knowing which number is one more / one less, and two more / two less. We were exposed to different kinds of number lines.

  Students also had 4 math centres: 

1) Creating a number line using sticky notes

2) Clip the number that is missing

3) Showing a number in 4 different ways

4) Find It! Subitizing Game

We are learning reading strategies to help us read!

We learned two Reading Strategies this week:  

Lips the Fish - Gets us ready to say the beginning sound of the word.

Stretchy Snake - Helps us slowly stretch out each sound of the word and we read the whole word.  

We practiced these strategies in isolation many times. Watch some of the students learn how to use Stretchy Snake.

 And during Guided Reading with me, students applied the strategies to reading their decodable readers.

We have also learned what the 5 vowels are.  Old MacDonald's Vowel Farm helps us remember them.

We read the story The Crayon Box That Talked, which helped us learn that in our classroom we are all unique and even though we are all different, we can all get along and respect one another. Then we created our own crayon box. 

We also FINALLY finished our colour wheel with the help of Mrs. Banks.  The wheel will be up in our classroom all year and we will refer to to it often while we work through our Creating Colour unit. Thank you to everyone for sending in all the items for the colour wheel. This week the students were working on learning to read their colour words.

from all the turkeys in 1C!