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!
 

                                                     

Blast from the Past!

What a fun week!

50's day was so much fun! Everyone looked so great and we rocked out to some Elvis Presley! 

For Math we talked about skip counting to 50 by 2's, 5's, and 10's. They did great with this! They are really getting the hang of skip counting from practicing in the mornings. We also made our "I can make 50!" poster. We discovered that to make 50 you would need 5 groups of 10. In centers each student showed groups of ten using different materials. 

 And to add to 50's the students had filled up their Warm Fuzzie Jar by being an awesome group of kids, showing good listening and participating in class discussions. When they fill this jar they get a popcorn movie party! For the last bit of the day we enjoyed Jimmy Neutron and Popcorn!

In Math this week we have started out addition unit! We started off with talking about numbers and their parts and how we put them together in addition. 

When we are solving math problems we can use many different strategies, it just depends on what we like best! Some of the strategies we worked with this week were: 

- Using our FINGERS! This is the easiest and most convenient one! 

- Counting ON! Putting the biggest number in our head, holding up the second number of fingers and counting to find the answer. 

- Drawing pictures! Using dots or pictures to represent both numbers and count them all together. 

- Number Lines! We always start on the bigger number and jump as many times as we need to add, we should land on our answer! 

We even made some Dino Addition Stories!

We had some special visitors this week in our class! Firefighters! As part of our Social curriculum we take a look at our community and the people who help keep it safe and running. Firefighter Patrick and Firefighter Sinead cam to teach us about fire safety! As well as, share with us some of the things they are responsible for as a community helper! Thanks Firefighter Patrick and Firefighter Sinead!

And they even timed me dressing up! I did it in less than a minute! 

We also found time to make our Christmas cards! We mixed our Science knowledge with our Art skills! In our creating colour unit we learned all about how to make secondary colours from our primary colours. Each students used blue and yellow to make different shades of green with water colour paints. That green paper was used to make Christmas trees for our cards! I hope you enjoy them as much as we liked making them!

Happy Remembrance Day!

Shortest short week!

I thought I would add some photos of some things that also happened this week and some of the activities we did this week.

Last week at our assembly, Mrs. Lysgaard talked to the school about operation Christmas Child. A letter was sent home earlier in the month about asking for boxes for this foundation. The idea is to fill a box with presents for children in need. If you are still interested in this foundation you can find more info here.
Through this discussion we also talked about doing something for studens in our own community and school. As a school project we have decided to decorate quilt squares with our names, pictures or messages to put together for Logan and Scarlet!

With our computer time this week the students explored google classroom and drive. From classroom they were shared an assignment to create their own poppies in google drawings! It was tough getting started, but once they got in a groove they took off! Look how great these poppies are!

In Math we started out Addition and Subtraction to 12 by making parts for numbers to 12. Working with blocks we would create a whole number, split it into 2 parts and then see how many combinations we can use to make our whole! As we start to have a solid understanding of this concept addition should be a breeze! 

In Science we discussed Natural vs. Manufactured colours. An example of natural colours are lemons are yellow. An example of manufactured would be a yellow tennis ball. Natural colours are things that exist in nature, where as manufactured would be colours that are made. As a fun project we went through magazines looking for pictures of each category and putting them on a t-chart.

We will be having a printing specialist from Alberta Health coming next week! How lucky are we? She will help us with printing on the lines, printing letters the right size and how our letters should work. 

It's Getting Colder and We're Keeping Busy!

Every week that goes by I am so amazed by how much growth these little kiddos have made!

In Language Arts we are building our stamina with Daily 5's Read to Self. They are taking this so seriously, its fantastic! As we practice, I am introducing our Animal Friends reading strategies. This week we have talked about Eagle Eyes (using the pictures to help use figure out a tricky word), Lips the Fish (getting your mouth ready, saying the first letters sound) and Stretchy Snake (stretch out the letter sounds to figure out the word sh iiii p). 

After we discuss our strategies the students go to their desks to build their stamina. Right now our goal is 3 minutes of reading the whole time, sticking to our seats and whisper voices only. 

We made a goal chart to see what kinds of things we can start doing as we build our stamina. 

We have also started doing a lot of writing! This is a preamble to our Work on Writing Daily 5 center. We do brainstorming and writing as a class to teach the skills for when they do independent work. So far we have written sentences about bats, things we like and our weeks at school. This week we learned how to write a list! Using our popcorn words as inspiration we wrote lists about things that are little. 

In phonics we have been focusing on short vowel sounds in words and have covered a, o, and i. Next week we will be moving onto short vowel e. There is a few students who still struggle to hear the difference between e and i words. 

In Math this week we are wrapping up our Numbers to 20 unit with estimating and comparing numbers to 20. Estimating is a fun skill to work with in Math. We talk about it as our best guess, we want to make a guess that makes sense. When we recognize what certain groups of objects look like (i.e. a group of ten, or 20) then we can estimate a number of objects compared to that idea. 

With comparing numbers we are ensuring we know the number order to 20 and each numbers respective value. 

Next week we will begin our Adding and Subtracting to 12 unit. 

In Social we had lots of groups things to share! Students have brought in lots of items that represent some of the groups that they belong to. 

Some examples of groups that we belong to are: 

- Our Family 

- Our School: Student councils, book clubs, classroom, grade 1's, etc.

- Community: Sports teams, dance clubs, gymnastics, bear cubs, sparks, etc. 

                                              
                         

In Science we discussed what Transparent and Opaque mean. Transparent is when we can see through and object and opaque is when we cant. We tested some liquids this week on the transparency. 

We also added water to paint to make it become more transparent. You may have seen some of the disappearing stars show up at home!