Happy Holidays!

Wow! Our kiddos did amazing at the Christmas Concert! They were so well behaved and sang beautifully!

In Language Arts this week we have continued talking about Long Vowels and their patterns. We have all been learning about the Bossy e! Bossy e is when we add the silent e to the end of a word to make the middle vowel say its name, such as, lake, bike or cute. 

For Writing work, we used some of the bossy e words we made during our activities to make up our own sentences. When we write our sentences we make sure we have capitals at the beginning, finger spaces between our words and end them with a period! 

With Daily 5 everyday these guys amaze me with how great of readers they are becoming. We are now up to 10 minutes of Read to Self and get to choose any spot in the room to read! They absolutely love this! 

In Math, we spent some time practicing our subtraction strategies with games and other work. We have talked a lot about how subtraction is the opposite of addition and we can use what we know about addition problems to solve subtraction problems! 

We practiced our skills by playing Horse Races again!

We had a great last day before the holidays! We were all so comfy in our pajamas and got to do some crafts!

 

Information for the New Year: 

- School resumes on Monday January 4th. 

- Our Spelling Program will begin our first week back at school, our first test will be Jan 8th. 

- Popcorn words will resume the second week of school. 

- Early Dismissal Jan 6th.

- Report Cards sent home January 28th.  

- PD Day January 29th. 

Over the break your child can keep their reading fresh with any of the links under Reading and Phonics links at the side of this page.
Encourage your child to play math games and practice their math facts with war (cards or dice) and any of the math links at the side of the page. If you need log in info, please let me know!

Have a Happy Holidays!

1 More Week!

It's almost Christmas and our classroom is buzzing!

In Language arts this week, we are continuing to practice letter writing to our elf, Snowflake Jingles George! This week they wrote to him about things they would like to wish for for Christmas! 

We are also continuing with our Daily 5 routing and have made it up to 10 mins of Read to Self!! This is a huge accomplishment for these guys! Every week I am so amazed with how much they have grown as readers. 

With our phonics we have started talking about long vs. short vowels. Short vowel sounds are in words like cat, bet, fit, fun, and cot. Our long vowel sounds are when the vowel says its name, as in bait, kite, cute, bone and speek. We have talked about some of the familiar letter patterns that make the long A sound. Try quizzing your child to see if they can tell the difference! 

We played a fun vowel game - Word Fishermen! Students used vowels to make new words from the cards in the middle of the pond!

In Math this week we have started talking about subtraction! We now know that subtraction is when we take something away from a larger number. Subtraction can be a tricky concept for some students, it might help to give them some practice at home!

To introduce this we read the book Pete the Cat and his Four Groovy Buttons! I love this book! It's a great way to introduce the concept of subtraction. After reading the book we re-enacted the story using buttons in groups of 4 and then made our own little Pete the Cat books. 

Playing Simon Says with Eyes closed, only using our Hearing sense!

In Science we are continuing to talk about our 5 Senses! Ealier in the week we did a reaction time experiment! We tested our reaction times (how long it takes our senses to send a message to our brain and our brain tell our body what to do) first by doing a ruler catch. 

We also took our testing outside, we had our eyes closed and used our sense of hearing to listen for the whistle and start running! 

 

 

 

Next week we have the Christmas Concert on Dec. 17th and then our PJs and Party on Friday Morning!

Christmas Explosion! 

WOW! Everyone looked so great on Friday for our Dress up day! Christmas exploded all over the room! 

Countdown to Christmas!

The countdown is on and we have a guest in our room!

December 1st, when we arrived to our class we were shocked to see an elf hanging from our walls! His name is Snowflake Jingles George and you might have heard a bit about him!
Snowflake Jingles George was sent here by Santa - with no name, we gave him that - to watch our class and see how they behave! Every night he flies back to the North Pole to tell Santa who's been good and who's been bad! The only catch is he's quite the sneaky elf! He's been swinging around our room, eating popcorn out of the garbage!

On the first day we wrote home about our elf, drew his picture and wrote his name.
In Work on Writing, we learned how to write a letter this week. We took sometime to write to our elf a little something about us.

We are continuing to practice our Read to Self in Daily 5! We are now up to 7 minutes of reading stamina!! Next week we are aiming to read the WHOLE time for 10 minutes.

We are still working on practicing our addition facts this week. We have been practicing through lots of games!
In groups of 4 the students played Horse Races, an addition race! In teams of 2 they rolled dice, added the numbers together and the highest sum gets to put their dice on the horse track! The lower sum goes to the pond. They really enjoyed this game and did very well with adding!

We also played addition war! Much like regular war, but you draw 2 cards, add them together and the highest sum wins! This is a really easy game to play at home to practice math facts. - all you need is a deck of cards!






In Science we have started our Senses unit! We have 5 senses, which work through 5 body parts. Sight - Eyes, Hearing - Ears, Touch - Skin/Hands, Taste - Tongue, Smell - Nose.

As our first experiment we had to use our senses to describe the making of popcorn! I had the popcorn machine hidden behind a divider and started it up. First we used hearing, then we could start smelling! Once I removed the box we used our eyes to describe what we could see, our hands to tell what it felt like and finally our tongues to taste!

For some Christmas Art we did a guided drawing lesson of a reindeer! They are sooooo adorable. We outlined them with oil pastels and have completed step one by colouring the background with water colour paints.

It has definite been a busy week! Here are a few reminders about the next weeks until Christmas: 
Dec 10th - Alix Mac Sr. High Band Performance at 10:30
Dec 11th - Christmas Explosion Day! Dress up like Christmas Exploded all over you! 
Dec 16th - Christmas Concert dress rehearsal (we will be wearing pajamas for our song, please pack some this day)
Dec 17th - Christmas Concert!
Dec 18th - PJ Day! Wear your jammies to school! We will also be having a party this day, if you would like to sign up to supply snacks for the party click here. 

Snow, Snow, Snow!

What a blizzardy week!

In class we had quite the whirlwind too, is there a full moon?! Fittingly this weeks Printing Practice letters were half moon letters. When we're working with Nurse Brenda we are building our fine motor skills in order to create more legible and confident writers! This is printing without pencils!
This week to make our half moon letters we used our fingers in salt. We followed the directions and motions for each letter.

In Science this week we finished up our Creating Colour unit! We did a cool transferring colour experiment with paper towels and food colouring. We predicted what each colour match would create and let time tell!
As we left the experiment over night the water traveled up the paper towel and transferred into the middle cup (which was initially clear) and made a new colour! Now we have a beautiful rainbow of colours! Test your kiddos at home to see if they know their colour mixing!

In Language Arts this week we have continued to work on Read to Self and are up to 5 minutes of continuous reading! This is a great accomplishment for us and they are really focused on building their reading stamina! We also work with Work on Writing and some Word Work activities.
We have now covered all our reading animal buddies (strategies) in class to help them with sounds out new words in their reading. Ever day I am so proud of how everyone is growing as readers!

In Math this week we focused on making doubles! You may have seen some of our doubles booklets come home! When we know our doubles facts it helps us solve similar math problems and become strong mathematical thinkers!
We started out the week with getting numbers and finding our doubles partner! Once they found their partner on paper they made their doubles math addition story and shared them with the class. We also made our booklets and played some math facts games!

In Social we discussed the differences between community (Leduc) and neighbourhood (Telford, Robinson, etc). This was a tough understanding for some of us, which is OK! The way I tried to explain it is, our community is a big puzzle and our neighbourhoods are the pieces that make it up! We talked about what we see in our neighbourhoods, such as, parks, grocery stores, schools and homes!

To wrap up the week with art we made magic carpets! This was a great way to show the students how oil pastels repel water! The art lesson was about all different types of lines. Straight, squiggly, loop y and many more! Using different lines they designed their magic carpets with oil pastels. Then using water colours they painted over the oil and like magic! their designs showed through!