September 10-13

We have been getting busy in the classroom! 

A Few Reminders: 

• No School Sept. 14th  - PD DAY
• Sept. 26th - AD-Mazing Orders due 
• Sept. 26th - School Photos
• Sept. 28th Terry Fox Run - Bring a toonie for Terry!

ELA

We have been hard at working learning new routines and expectations in the classroom. One routine we focused on this week was our Read to Self time. First we talked about what students like about reading. 

Do you like being read to? Reading out loud? Reading to yourself? What types of books do you like?

This gives me a little insight into how our year where go and how we will go about our reading time. 

Together we made a beautiful poster to put up in our reading corner! 

Students will colour and decorate this for our wall!

Next we talked about what Read to Self looks like and sounds like. By this age students have a pretty good idea of what behaviour is expected of them, and they have really proven themselves over the week! We have a big group of book lovers and avid readers! 

At first we started with reading in our desks, and eventually as students built their stamina they were able to move around the room. 

 During this time, I have been meeting with students to work on finding a long term reading book that piques their interest, and is at their reading level. These are some of my favourite conversations to have with students, because I get to hear what they love about books, what worlds they like to be in when they read, and find them a good book or series they will really enjoy.

We started KidBlog this week! Kidblog is an online journal, where we have daily quick writes. Students can answer review and respond to their peers writing, as well as, ask questions of each other.

In order to log on, your child will need to visit Ms. Potter's KidBlog  and log in with google
(they will need to know their google ID). On Mondays students will journal write on KidBlog, where they will work on focus writing skills from previous week. As this was our first week, students talked about a subject they are all pretty much experts on - themselves! On Wednesday, students had a chance to respond to each other's posts and leave comments. We have a discussion as a class about how to comment appropriately, and follow some guidelines. 

Next week we will start introducing the other daily topics. 

We also worked on how to Stretch a Sentence when writing this week. This is how we get our sentences to go from 1 STAR rating, to 5 STARS. When writing a sentence, we want to ask ourselves a few questions to make sure our sentence is interesting to the reader and full of detail. Together we stretched many sentences on animals and students worked on adding adjectives to their who to really paint a picture in the reader's mind. 

Math 

This week we have been working on patterns, and more specifically increasing and decreasing number patterns. We focus on the basic skills of counting up, catching the number in your hand and counting up to follow the pattern. As well as, counting back. This basic skill also comes in handy when we are adding numbers up to 10 000. 

Next week, we will start discussing how to identify a pattern rule, and extend a pattern. 

Science 

Every year we start with understanding the scientific method. This is the process to how and why experiments are carried out. We work with the following steps: 

• Question: based on your personal interest and knowledge, what are you wanting to research and conduct and experiment about? 
• Hypothesis: based on what you know and have read - what is your best guess as to what will happen?
• Materials: What items will you need to conduct your experiment?
• Procedure: What are the steps to your experiment?
• Observations/Data: What did you see? Collect? Record?
• Conclusion: What did you find out from your experiment?

As a class, we conducted an experiment - using a hair dryer to suspend a ping pong ball in the air! This experiment demonstrates how air pressure works. 

I also introduced to students our optional, year long, science project! Please check out the Science Project tab on this blog for more info. 

Social

Our first unit to explore is mapping. In small groups, students looked at various maps and tried to determine what they could see and find on the maps. Students were given various formats to observe and they came up with lots of findings! 

                 

Next, we looked at the various landforms that are found on our earth and create a Landform's Visual Dictionary! 

SPECIAL EVENTS

BUS SAFETY

These kiddos sure rocked it this year! They started off with a pop quiz game and then headed out for their practice bus evacuation! They all passed with flying colours! 

We were so fortunate to have Motivational Magic return to our school! Steve Harmer put on quite the magic show, all while teaching students the value of friendship. AND HE PULLED A RABBIT OUT OF HIS HAT!