Welcome Back to Grade 1!!!

All About This Blog!
When you click on the tabs at the top of the page you are able to:

On our Home page you will find updates of what we have been up to this week, where we are in our subjects and curriculum and some pictures of what activities we do! I do update this site weekly to make sure everyone stays informed!

Click Calendar to see what our School Year Calendar is, this calendar is digital and spans to the end of the year! This will include all special events, field trips, holidays and PD Days.

At the side of our page are some links, they can take you to learning sites we will work with throughout the year.

Also at the side will be our Popcorn words, which get sent home Mondays in a homework folder with some activities for the students to work on their sight words and is returned to school the following Monday to be checked and receive the next weeks words. Our spelling words will also be listed on the side when we start our program.

I am always open for conversation and can be reached by email or by our school phone.

Here's what we have been up to so far in Grade 1!!

What a quick and fun week! We spent a lot of time getting to know each other and play some games to learn each others names! So far it has been FANTASTIC getting to meet all these kiddos!

We have read a few books and did a little craftivity around the book "David Goes to School". David if your typical rule breaker and helped us come up with some smart classroom rules. As a class we wrote up a set of rules we would love to follow and read them and signed our poster!

As a craft we made our own little David's and the students came up with some school wide rules that were pretty important. They turned out great! A lot of the kiddos gave David a wild hair style, straight stick hair or some thick locks. It was great to see them printing whole words to complete a sentence!

In Math we will be working on counting numbers 1 - 10, their value and different ways to represent each number. We practiced writing our numbers playing a dice game! The students were awesome, they were all focused and competitive to beat their opponent in a number tracing race!

 



Just some things about our classroom: 
- We do have a severe tree nut allergy - no nut products are to come to school

- Agendas go home in their RED Kangapouches every night. In the agenda important notes or reminders will be recorded. Each night it is our hope parents will sign each day to show they have read the note. When a student has a signature they will get a stamp for that day!

- Chewing gum is OK, IF it is sugar free, labelled and brought to me. I will keep all the gum together and students may chew gum during desk work time.

- Popcorn Words Homework duotang will be sent home next week. 

- Home Reading program will start in Late October - November 

- Spelling will start after Christmas Break

Have A Wonderful Summer!!

Wow! The last 3 months have been amazing. Getting to know all these little kiddos was hilarious and wonderful. Thank you all for having such superb children! I am going to miss them over the summer! Luckily, I will be returning to East in the fall in Grade 1!

Our last week was a busy one, as usual!

Monday we have our Sports Fun Day outside! The weather was perfect! The kids were having a great time getting their faces painted, playing in bubbles and even some boys were playing sports with the grade 6's! They were so proud of themselves for keeping up :). I was in charge of an obstacle course station and was able to catch a few snaps!

In Math we finished up our 3D shapes unit talking about the names of shapes and how we can sort them based on one attribute. The students were getting quite good at sorting by the end of the week! On Friday we had a little fun playing all the math games we have learned since April. I can't believe how good these kiddos are getting at their math facts! Feel free to play these games over the summer to continue to practice math facts!

      - Add it up War: Using a regular deck of cards (K, Q, J = 10, Jokers = 0), students flip 2 cards and the highest sum wins all the cards! Ties are the classic war strategy of lining up three cards and then next draw - highest card wins! They loved this game and it can be played anywhere and with subtraction (lowest sum wins).
     - Math Facts With Dice: Students roll two dice each, highest sum wins and is awarded 10 points (lowest sum for subtraction). At the end you add up all the points to see who's won! Play with about 15 turns.

Thursday was our PJ & Movie Day! Thank you parents for all your treats! We had a comfortable afternoon with very full bellies!

 We had a special visit from the Grade 2's to present their Social projects. The grade 2's gave us a preview of what is to come next year in Social! Thank's Mrs. Kruse's class!

On our last day Liam was a guest reader and read to the students one last time for the end of the year. 

Have a wonderful summer and enjoy any vacations you go on! See some of you in September!!! 

Only so many days left!

Hard at work!

This week has been a wonderful, busy and exciting week!

On Monday was had a Special Artist Visitor, Miss. McKenzie show us some tricks with paper to make pop up animal art! They students did amazing jobs! This tied in with our Building Things unit in creating 3D art. The students thought of an animal, then recreated the habitat you would find them in. Aren't they gorgeous!

 

They did so good!

Finished Products!

Tuesday we had our trip to the Devonian Gardens! The students were able to observe the different signs of summer and spring, as well as, learn about the needs of animals, spot animal homes, and discussion about animal food chains.

Made it to the center of the maze!

Walking around we really got to see a lot of amazing greenery and plants! The students had a blast running in the open for most of the day. Here are a few teaser photos. To view a full album of the trip click here. 

A web of Animal Interactions 

Enjoying Nature & Lookin' Cool

In Math we are working with 2D shapes and making sorting rules. We made a list of attributes (what shapes look and feel like) so we could sort our shapes and create sorting rules. We use some shapes stickers and the students came up with their own sorting rules! 

 

In Science we have put our building skills to the test! We have done some exploring with different materials and tested them for strength, waterproof and flexibility. 

After learning about the tallest buildings in the world and their shapes the students worked in groups using different materials to make the tallest tower! 

Plastic cups were the tallest!

Our school is currently a donation spot for this very deserving bottle drive trust fund. If you have a garage full of bottles bring them on down on Wednesday, June 24th! 

Important Dates to Remember: 

June 22nd - Sports Fun Day 12:45 - 2:45 (Outside)

Only 2 More Weeks!

What a busy week!

This week in Language Arts this week we have been talking about the Long I pattern of -y, in words such as cry, fly, try. We have put a big focus on blends and the sounds they make. We played "Blends Around the Room" where we had posters of blends all over the room and in groups students had to think up words that had those blends in them. They did great coming up with tons of words!
 

We have also started a story writing project. We have read the book Charlie's Superhero Underpants, and the students are in the process of planning their own Superhero Clothing Story!
We started out discussing how all stories have beginnings, middles and ends. We went through our story and decided what happens in the beginning (Introduce characters, setting and problem) in the middle (the main events of the story) and the end (solution to the main problem). Some of their ideas are hilarious and I can't wait to hear their finished stories!

In Math this week we have talked a lot about problem solving and reading word problems. We have figured out which words in a word problem tell us to add or subtract, which numbers we use and which strategies we can use to solve them (draw a picture, number lines or tallies).



This week in Science we dreamed up some Dream Inventions! Now that we know about which materials work best for building certain objects, we designed some pretty wild inventions and described in writing what was special about each one!

We also went through some of our donated materials to see what we could think to build with them. Thank so much for everything that has been sent in!


In our class we had Grade 1 orientation for the kindergartens this week! They came into our class and our ones got to have fun in kindergarten again! It went really well, I can't wait to get to know these kiddos next year!

Just a couple reminders:

June 16th - Devonian Gardens Field Trip (we have two volunteers so far and could have a couple more if anyone is available, email me.)
- We will be outside most of the day so make sure to pre-sunscreen and pack a hat.
- Wear comfy shoes!

Lookin' at the Blog

Today we got on the computers to explore the blog! We went through all the pages and checked out some of the links. 

There was lots of pictures of us learning we got to look through! It was nice to look back and remember what we have done over the past couple of months. 

Well Grade 1's, what did you think??

Track & Field Week!

This week in Math we have been talking about doubles! Doubles are any time you add a number to itself! When we know our doubles really quick it can help us to solve similar math problems. (4 + 4 = 8, so 4 + 5 = 4 + 4 + 1  = 9!).  We also had some time in math centers to practice our doubling skills, addition skills in some games and activities.

Doubles + 1 Stamping

Roll & Colour the sum

On Tuesday we had the chance to play Doubles Mash Up! We mashed some dice and tallied out sets of doubles. Try testing your child at home on their doubles facts!

Doubles Mash Up 

In Language Arts we have been talking about Long I's i_e pattern and how we can read long i patterns in shared reading activities. This week we read a story together, highlighted the words with long i sounds and answered comprehension questions about the story. 

In phonics we have also begun to talk about consonant blends and the sounds they make. We did a sorting activity to identify blends in the beginning, middle and end of words. Next week we will be looking at blends and the long i pattern "-y" at the end of words. 

Track and Field was on Thursday! Our Grade 1's were awesome! It was a long and hot day and they ran their very best! I sure you saw a lot of tired faces on Thursday night! We will hear some results in a little over a week. Here are some snaps from the day! I was in the marshaling field so I was only able to catch a few of the boys races. 

Some of the girls cheering and stretching. 

Tagging up in the relay!

This week we had a special guest, Mr. Maltais! He came and taught us how to log on to our chromebooks, practice typing in a google document and even some fun typing games! Look at the Learning Links at the right of this blog to try out some games and links! 

In Science we started talking about our new unit Building Things. As a class we came up with a list of things that we could build and what materials we use to build things. Soon we will be testing materials for specific purposes and begin to build our own creations! Keep sending in your recyclables!