Upcoming Science Unit

Dear Parents/Guardians,

My previous post about our next science unit was a mistake! I had said we are starting our Needs of Plants and Animals unit, but in fact we are starting our 'Building things unit! Sorry for the mix-up!

 

We are going to be starting our science unit on Building Things in the next few weeks. It is a really fun unit, but it requires lots of materials. Therefore, we are requesting your help!

 

If you have any of the following items that are empty and clean, please send them with your child to school.

 

·      Kleenex boxes

·      Cereal boxes

·      Yogurt cups

·      Shoe boxes

·      Toilet paper tubes

·      Paper towel tubes

 

 

  If you would like to purchase and donate some supplies, here is our “wish list”

·      Box of straws

·      Box of popsicle sticks

·      Pipe cleaners

·      Paper plates

·      Paper or plastic cups

·      String/Twine

·      Ribbon

·      Scotch tape or duct tape

* Please note, you will not get the items back again. Please continue to watch the blog, as list will be updated once we have received enough of each material.

Thank you for your help!

The Grade 1 Team

Our week at a glance

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a restful weekend. This week's sight words are: write, go, see, on and number. Your child will bring home some word work in their yellow folder. We are also continuing to work on our 'The Very Hungry....' stories and have started our good copies! We have two scheduled blocks with our grade 3 buddies to do some research on our animals and to look up pictures to help us with our illustrations this week. We hope to have a finished copy to bring home and read to parents for the weekend!

For literacy groups we are working on the blends /sh/ and /ch/. Ask your child what they worked on in their small group and who their new group members are!

In math we continued with our mental math strategies and learned a new doubles game. Ask your child to teach you how to play when they show you their work in the yellow folder.

Now that our plants are fully grown and we have re-potted them, the students will be bringing home their 'Seed to Sprout' journals to share with parents.  We will wrap up our senses unit soon and move on to the needs of Plants and Animals and continue to integrate learning about the seasons.

Tomorrow we will begin presenting our family interviews! We have continued with this unit by drawing a family portrait, discussing the concept of 'home' and drawing time lines of important events in our lives.  Ask your child to share one important event that they put on their time line:-)

I hope everyone has a wonderful week!

-Ms. C

Our 100th Day Celebration!

Today for our 100th day of school, we celebrated being 100 days SMARTER! We started off our day with some music and writing. We finished the writing prompt: When I am 100 years old.... Some of the ideas were pretty funny including, ' I will be sky diving' to 'I will be jumping on a trampoline with squirrels!' The students also got their picture taken (for those who wanted to participate) and had it turned into an old picture using the Aging Booth app. The students were pretty excited to see themselves at 100 years old and are excited to bring them home on Monday to share with their families!

For math we practiced skip counting to 100 in different ways. We sang songs, did movement and wrote down how to count by 2s, 5s and 10s. The the students were challenged to work in a group to create different piles of 100 objects using things found in the room. The students came up with some very clever ideas for how to collect the objects and worked as a team to make groups of 10. Some of their ideas included counting out 100 blocks, 100 books, 100 pencil crayons and 100 markers.

After lunch, the students were posed a problem that they needed to solve in order to get their treat from me! I had a bag of M&Ms. I told the students that there were 100 M&Ms and that they needed to work as a team to figure out how many each student should get if there are 23 students in the class. They could use blocks, drawings and/or whiteboards to solve the problem, but they couldn't get their M&Ms until they had a solution! I was VERY proud when 3 different table groups solved the problem in 3 different ways! One team used blocks and created 23 piles. They started out with 2 blocks in each pile and counted the total number of blocks they had. They continued to add one block to each pile until they knew they were close to 100. Another group used a whiteboard and drew a picture of 23 circles in which they added dots to until they had equal numbers in each group that added up to 100. The third group wrote numbers inside their circles on a whiteboard and counted first by 2s and then by 3s and then by 4s to come up with their solution. The answer was that each student would have 4 M&Ms and that there would be 8 left over!

It was a great 100th day of school and I look forward to many more with these wonderful students! Hope you all have a great weekend:)

We are 100 days SMARTER!

The grade 1s have been keeping track since the very first day of school and are very excited to celebrate their 100th day of school tomorrow!

Your child may come home and excitedly tell you that we are having a PARTY. Please don't panic! You do not need to bring anything in or do anything special. We will be having a regular day with some fun, 100-themed activities in math, writing, reading and more! 

Thank you for your continued support in your child's education and looking forward to a fun day:)

Welcome back!

Welcome back from your long weekend!

We started off our week by doing activities with our new sight words: more, look, two, has and time. We have also continued to work on our Very Hungry Animal stories by adding in some juicy, descriptive words!

For math we have been practicing using our mental math skills to solve math problems. This week we focused on our doubles and doubles + 1 strategy.

Our plants have grown so tall that we needed to re-pot them in separate pots,  add soil and place them in the window of our classroom. Ask your child how they plan to help take care of our class plants!

I have started getting the Family Interview questionnaires back from the students;  thank you! In case some of my students lost their sheet I will be sending another one home soon so that we can start presenting next week.

I hope everyone enjoys the rest of the short week:-)

Our Short Week!

Just a REMINDER that there is no school on Thursday, February 16th, Friday, February 17th and Monday, February 20th due to Teacher's convention and family day.

The students in room 119 had a fun, short week! On Tuesday we did a Valentine's day craft, listened to some music and discussed ways that we have shown HEART here at Ken Taylor this year. I am going to start keeping track of students who get "caught" showing the HEART values and other students can also nominate their peers for being helpful, accepting, empathetic responsible and truthful.

For Science, we used our senses to describe our basil, dill and parsley plants. We even used our sense of taste today! Some of the students liked the taste of the plants while others did NOT!

We then drew diagrams of our plants, with labels, and wrote some describing words to explain the taste. Ask your child which plant tasted the best!

For literacy, we have been working on a new wall story. This week it was 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' by Eric Carl. Our book, of course, is illustrated by us! We read it every day and find sight words, new vocabulary, patterns and punctuation.

We are using the pattern in this book to write a story of our own. Each student picked an animal and then followed the pattern of the story to create their own, sometimes silly story! We are going to do some research next week about our animals and find out what sorts of things they like to eat. The vocabulary we are focusing on with this activity is the days of the week, numbers words and some tough words like 'through' and 'hungry'. This also ties into our science units of the senses and our upcoming unit, the Needs of Plants and Animals. Ask your child which animal they are writing about!

Enjoy your long weekend with your families and I will see you all On Tuesday, February 21st when classes resume!

~Ms. Carstairs

Valentine's Day

For Valentine’s Day tomorrow, our class will be participating in holiday themed activities; we will not be having a ‘party’. If your child would like to bring Valentines (this is not mandatory!) please bring for the entire class to ensure no one feels left out! I sent home a list of student names with your child today; we have 12 boys and 12 girls.

Thanks!