Our week at a glance

This week we will be starting another cycle of small, focused literacy groups with the help of the educational assistants and all the other grade 1 teachers. The focus of these groups will vary but will focus on letters and letter sounds, CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant), and other sight words from the FRY's first 100 sight word list.

As a class, we have focused on short vowel sounds with a focus on each sound per week. Now that we have focused on each vowel, we will continue to reinforce this learning through word work, writing and guided reading and continue to improve our distinction of these similar sounds. You can practice this at home by spelling some CVC words. CVC words are short, 3 letter words with a consonant-vowel-consonant order that are read exactly as they sound.

During guided reading, we will incorporate some reading comprehension strategies as taught to us by Miriam Trehearne, the literacy specialist we were very lucky to have come to our school recently. We have also started using a Story Wall to improve our fluency, comprehension and decoding skills. Ask your child about the story on our wall that we are reading and illustrating!

In math, we are focusing on our mental math skills. Part of this work relies on developing fluency with some of those basic facts. We are playing games and working with partners to master our DOUBLES and FRIENDS of 10 addition facts! You can practice these at home; ask your child to teach you a simple game using a deck of cards.

In preparation for the Kenneth Taylor School opening on February 10th, we have been talking about the HEART values. At KTS we are Helpful, Empathetic, Accepting, Responsible, and Truthful. Ask your child to give you an example of a time that they have shown HEART.

Big Box of Cards Fundraiser!

Your child will be coming home with a Big Box of Cards today. This is a fundraising effort. If parents do not want to purchase the greeting cards they are asked to send them back to school. They will be charged the $33 if they do not return the cards with all 33 cards in it.

If you would like to purchase the cards, keep the box and send $33 cash or cheque to school. (GST is included in that price.) If you would like to purchase additional boxes of cards, you may fill out an order form that was sent home with the box and include the appropriate amount of money in the envelope.

Thank you for your help with this fundraiser, put on by parent council.

Yellow Folder

The yellow folder that was sent home with your child today is to go home everyday after school and come back to school every morning. If your child did not finish their math or literacy work, it will go in the folder and they can finish it at home. If they finished their work, they can bring it home and show you how hard they are working and what specific skills they are working on! Sometimes there may be extra practice activities and sight word work or flashcards that we are working on as a class.

Please let me know if you have any questions/concerns!

Reminder!

Just a friendly reminder that tomorrow is early dismissal so the students will go home at 11:35 when they are dismissed :)

Our week!

We started off the week with a focus on the short vowel /i/. We will continue to work on this vowel sound until Friday. The students have been bringing home their morning word work to show you at home what types of activities they are doing at school! Also, our sight words this week are: use,  which,  each,  there, and  an.  For the next few weeks we are working hard on learning the first 100 words from the Fry Sight word list. Here is a link to the list and flashcards that you can download, print and practice at home!

http://www.uniqueteachingresources.com/support-files/fryfirst100set.pdf

Our plants are continuing to grow each day and we were excited to see that the dill seeds are sprouting a couple of inches above the seed pod! Our basil continues to grow more leaves and we still haven't seen any sprout from our parsley yet. The students combined literacy and science by learning how to label their drawings using science vocabulary. We will use this same strategy when discussing our families and how we belong in Social Studies and work on specific vocabulary through a variety of activities such as building a family tree.

In math we are continuing to build on our mental math skills by reviewing skip counting by 2s, 5s and 10s. Students worked on this by filling in specific columns in a hundreds chart and describing any patterns that they recognized. They will also continue to work on simple addition and subtraction word problems and computations.

We have been taking advantage of the warm weather lately and playing outside! Here are some photos of us having fun and working together to build things.

After lunch everyday we will continue to work in small, guided reading groups. Here is a group enjoying a funny book by Robert Munsch:)

Don't forget, this Friday is early dismissal so the students will be dismissed at 11:35!

Oral Story presentation

Today we had a special presentation from Denise Miller, who came in to tell some traditional Aboriginal stories. The kids sang and laughed and enjoyed this presentation very much! We have connected this to our social studies unit on Family and belonging and talked about what it means to be Canadian. Many of our parents and grandparents (and even some of us!) were born in other countries and now live in Canada and celebrate a variety of traditions.

We have continued to work on the short and long /e/ sound this week in literacy. Students complete some morning work on this skill everyday and have been bringing their work home to show parents at home some of the specific skills we do. We have also been working in guided reading groups everyday to improve our knowledge of sight words and practice our fluency and expression in reading.

Our basil plant is really growing now! The students have enjoyed using their senses to observe the plants and write down reflections. The dill plant also finally sprouted today! This created plenty of 'I wonder' questions. Why did the basil sprout first? When will the others sprout? We will continue to work in our 'Seed to Sprout' journals and add our learning to our living bulletin board.

Popcorn Treat Day

Our week at a Glance!

We will continue working on short and long vowel sounds with a focus on /e/ this week. We will combine different centers and whole  class activities to work on this sound including journaling, word building centers (stamps, play-doh,cut and paste) and Smartboard interactive activities!

For math we are continuing with addition and subtraction operations using numbers to 10 with a focus on simple word problems. We will use strategies such as using a number line, drawing a picture and using manipulatives to solve these problems.

In science, we will continue with our senses unit by observing our plants.  We were all very excited to observe that one of our seed pods has sprouted! We will do some observing, sketching and problem solving with the plant over the next week:)

Scholastic Book Orders

I have sent home the scholastic Book order forms. If you would like to buy some books, please return the order form on Monday! Thanks!

We're excited to see if our plants have sprouted by then!

Our little garden!

Today we planted our 3 seed pods in our Aerogarden and filled it up with water. Then we plugged it in and set the lights on a timer to give our plants 17 hours of sunlight every day. We planted basil, parsley and dill. We also started our 'Seed to Sprout' observation journals. Students started to write down the materials and procedure to plant our seeds. We will continue tomorrow by making hypotheses  about our experiment. Which will sprout first? How many days before we see the first sprout? We will use our 5 senses to collect data on what we see, smell, hear, (our Aerogarden bubbles!) feel and eventually, taste!

Welcome Back! Our week at a Glance:

Welcome back; I hope everyone had an enjoyable, restful break!

This week we will dive right into our work where we left off in December. For literacy, we will continue to work on our short and long vowel sounds with a focus on /a/ this week. We will continue to incorporate these skills into our guided reading and our daily journal writing.

For math, we will continue with our number sense unit with a focus on subtracting numbers up to 10. We used Play-doh and 10 frame mats to build balls and SQUISH them with our fists to subtract them! We also used dice, whiteboards and number lines to assist in the concept. We will continue to work on this skill in the upcoming weeks.

For science this term, I am sharing one of my Christmas presents with my students to use in the classroom! We will be using our Aerogarden to grow some herbs and fruits from seeds. It has a built in light and timer and uses water and pods to guarantee the growth of our seeds. We took a vote and will start growing dill, basil and parsley tomorrow! We will make some predictions, observations and reflections and monitor our plants from now until the end of the year and watch our plants grow. We will tie this to both the Science Units; The Senses and The Needs of Plants and Animals.