October Scholastic order

Your child will be coming with the scholastic book order forms for the month of October. If you would like to order some books, please use ParentPay online at scholastic.ca or send a cheque with the order form to school with your child. They are due this Halloween Monday, October 31st!

Halloween on Monday!

Next Monday is Halloween!  At Ken Taylor school it will be a regular learning day…with an opportunity for some Halloween fun learning as well.  Students can bring their Halloween costumes to school and will have a chance to change into them after lunch (except AM Kindergarten who are welcome to dress up for the morning). 

 

Here are some key points to observe:

• Students, who choose to, can bring costume to school in their backpack in the morning
• Students will go to their classroom after lunch; teachers will take attendance and then students can change into their costumes 
• Please keep your child’s costume simple - something that they can do themselves (i.e. no makeup - save it for the evening rounds)
• Pleasant, fun costumes please - no violence - no blood/gore
• Masks are okay as long as student can easily see through them for safety
• We will have a costume parade in the afternoon. Kindergarten will start and go through the next class (AM Kindergarten class will go around to classes in the morning). That class will join on and keep going.  The parade will continue and we will make our way back to kindergarten.  The first class of kindergarten will get dropped off and the rest of the school parades through and we continue on until everyone has paraded through and been dropped off. 
• Students are welcome to bring an additional (special) afternoon snack as after the costume parade they will be invited to have their special snack and do some fun ‘Halloween Learning’ (i.e. we are not having class parties)

Thank you for your support in preparing your child for a successful, fun day for October 31st

Pumpkin seed activities

The students have been using the pumpkin seeds from our pumpkin last week to do a variety of activities. Over the weekend, I dyed the seeds in 3 cool colours. The class first looked at some pictures that use warm colours like red, orange and yellow; and then some pictures that use cool colours like blue, green and purple. We talked about how the differences made us feel and what kinds of images we associated with each.
The students then split into groups to sort their seeds by colour. They used this information to learn about graphs and important elements of a graph. They placed their seeds on the graph to see which colour they had the most of and the least of. They also gave their graph a title and labeled the important information.
Today, students used the seeds to start learning about place value. We decided it would be easiest to count a large number of seeds by grouping them into piles of 10 first. Some other ideas included counting by 2s and 5s. After we counted our seeds; we split them into 24 equal piles so that each student would have the same amount of seeds to create and art piece.
Here are some pictures of the whole process!

Wow, what a week!

We had such a long, fun week filled with learning. Here are some things that happened at school this past week.

Our field trip to the corn Maze was a huge success! The students had a blast learning about the life cycle of a pumpkin, watching the pig races, and finding their way through the corn Maze.  What was your child's favourite part of the trip?

The next day at school we continued with our Writer's Workshop and incorporated a rubric and some examples for the kids to self assess their writing, and decide if they need to keep going or if they just need to add a few more details. The students independently take their writing to the rubric wall and check their work. They then decide if "I've only just begun", "I need to keep going" or "great! Now what else can I add?". They will each have opportunities to conference with their teacher one on one and decide on some goals and receive support in areas of growth.

On Friday we were able to extend our learning about pumpkins and incorporate our new number sense unit in math. I brought in a pumpkin that the students could feel, touch, smell and observe and I cut it open for us to examine what was inside! Each student received some pulp and seeds to explore and then we did some estimating and counting. We took guesses about how many seeds we thought would be in the entire pumpkin. The guesses ranged from 100 to 10 000! After we opened up the pumpkin, each student counted their own bowls of seeds. We then added them altogether. The entire pumpkin had 437 seeds! We set them aside and I will be washing and dyeing them different colours to continue to use for math next week, and eventually for an art project. Ask your child if their estimate was close to the actual count of seeds!

Field Trip TOMORROW!

Tomorrow is our trip to the Calgary Corn Maze!

Students will need to bring:

1.  Water bottle
2.  Packed picnic lunch and snacks (students will not be permitted to buy concession items)
3.  Boots
4.  Appropriate clothing for weather (dress in layers)

Volunteers please join Ms. Bakkan at 8 a.m. for a quick meeting in the project center after dropping your child off at their classroom.

Parents, please discuss field trip expectations with your child, on the bus and at the corn maze.

It's going to be a fun day!

Number Sense

After wrapping up our unit on Patterns, students began their number sense unit by working as a class to problem solve and identify different ways to represent a single number. After they completed that task they moved to a math center. The centers will focus on using different manipulatives and tools to represent and identify numbers, and to perform basic math operations.

Blue Day

In honour of our first blue, spirit day, the grade one students did a variety of activities involving the colour blue. In the morning, we used blue play-doh (one of our three primary colours) to build sight words. Later on, we read the story Red by Michael Hall, a story about a red crayon who turns out to be blue all along! We created a page in our visual journals to represent the story.

Toonie Treat Day!

BLUE Spirit day tomorrow!

Library

The school library is finally ready; and starting tomorrow, our class will be able to check out books to bring home and read with their families! We will have library every Thursday after lunch, so please ensure your child brings their book back either before or on Thursday of each week so that they can get a new one.

Lively Letters

Today the students learned their first 'Lively Letter!' We will be focusing on our short vowels first. Today we read the story about the short vowel 'a'.

An 'a' looks like an apple. It makes that sound, 'a - a - apple'. Students pretended to hold a big apple in their hand and make the 'a a a' sound as they took a big bite!

We then used this sound to add beginning and ending sounds to build some sight words. Here's an example of putting sounds together to build short 'a'  words.

https://youtu.be/8MvFB_Lw4Us?list=PLPuq1Bt7EvmhhLEA4F7mtc5CdSZoEB4BF

This is something you can do at home using magnetic letters, whiteboards, paper and markers or scrabble tiles to practice!

Sky, Grass and Dirt Writing

Here is a link to the Sky, Grass and Dirt writing formation website. All of the strip and practice sheets are free to print off, if you would like to practice some letter formation at home with your child!

http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/literacy/writing/ground-grass-sky-handwriting.html#.V_esLJMrKlM

I am Thankful!

In anticipation of Thanksgiving weekend, the students thought about ways in which they are thankful. They used their ideas to add to a craft and had the opportunity to make a card for someone special to show their thanks.
I wish all my students and their families a relaxing weekend filled with family :-)