November 10th

We spent the afternoon on Friday exploring colour in Science.  We read the funny story "The Day the Crayons Quit", which gave the students lots of laughs. We graphed our hair colour, eye colour and our favourite colours.  We learned about the six colours of the colour wheel and sorted through all our colourful items.  We then created our own giant colour wheel.  

In Social Studies, we read two wonderful books that helped us understand about our families.  We learned that all families are different, unique and special.  Students made a family tree and a family house.

We also had some discussions about Remembrance Day, which can be a difficult thing to understand when you are a little in Grade One. Reading stories always helps with difficult topics. I like to take this opportunity to focus on peace and talk about what that means to each of us.  The students were given the sentence starter "Peace feels like....." and they continued the sentence with one or two thoughts about what they thought peace felt like.  We also created a field of poppies that took many steps but in the end, turned out to be really pretty.

In Language Arts, our focus is now on word families. This week we targeted the 'at' family.  We had some "making words" lessons, played phonics games and read a word family mini book. For each week for the next little while we will be focusing on different word families. Learning about CVC (consonant/vowel/consonant) word families helps us become better readers.

Also in Language Arts, we have begun our book study of The Gruffalo, which is one of my all time favourite books.  It lends itself to some awesome activities about the elements of a story and some fantastic opportunities to learn about descriptive writing.  This week our focus was on the story elements.  We created an anchor chart of the parts of the story and the students did a similar one with pictures and labeling. The first time I read the story, I read it to them without showing them the pictures.  They used their imagination using the descriptive words about The Gruffalo in the story, to draw what they thought The Gruffalo looks like. They did a fantastic job!   Such creativity! We will use these drawing later on when we are doing some descriptive writing.