It was so nice to connect with so many families last night and today. If you are expecting a follow up email from me, I will try to get to it this weekend! I was pretty fully booked today and didn't end up with much time to follow up.
This week we have started exploring the question:
How do animals survive the winter?
I was very impressed with students prior knowledge on this topic. We started by talking about the needs of animals and the needs of humans, and how our needs as humans change in the winter. We discussed needing warmer clothing, heating our homes, not spending as much time outside, and how some of our needs remain the same (ie. food, water, oxygen, etc.)
We then discussed What animals hibernate? and Where do animals hibernate? as well as how animals prepare for hibernation. Students really enjoyed acting as an animal preparing for and then hibernating as I travelled around the classroom trying to guess the animal they were pretending to be. I feel that I have learned some new information about hibernation as well. Here are a few videos that we've watched to help support our learning.
This one is a little trickier to understand but I thought it was interesting. We paused the video a lot to talk about what was happening, and only watched the first half.
We looked at some picture examples of different types of shelters that animals use for hibernation. I also found a very cute kids art hub of a hibernating bear that I couldn't resist doing with the class yesterday afternoon. We have been openly discussing what we are learning along the way and some of the animals that we were surprised to learn are hibernators.
We will continue to explore different animals and the way that they survive the winter. We will have a building project coming up shortly that I think students will really enjoy.
This week we completed a few activities related to our hermit crabs. We finished up the hermit crab habitats from the end of last week based on "A Home for Hermit Crab" by Eric Carle. We also did a little bit of graphing (this is part of the grade 2 curriculum but the number sense aspect is also great for grade 1). The students REALLY enjoyed using the spinner and they did a great job with the addition questions as well.
Students also did an online shape quiz on Kahoot. They seemed to enjoy the patterns quiz we did so I thought this would be a fun way to check in on their understanding. I think we need a little more practice with some of the trickier 2D shapes and then we will start discussing some 3D shapes. (I put my little blurb about shapes in the wrong paragraph before.. clearly I have been staring at my computer screen for too long!)
We continued with our focus on vowel sounds and learned about long and short O sounds this week. The kids really like this video series and think they are quite funny. Students in grade 1 drew 4 things with the short o sound and 4 with the long o sound. Grade 2 students did the same and attempted to spell these words using the vowel combinations they learned.
On Thursday, I read the story "The Mitten" which students really enjoyed. I then had students place pictures of the animals in the order they remembered from the story. This activity was meant to support students ability to retell stories and develop their sequencing skills. After students tried to put the pictures in order, we watched the story on the Smart Board and they were able to re-arrange them to the correct order.
We also continued with our Gratitude Journals this week. Students responded to the following questions:
- Who are you grateful for in your family and why?
- What are you grateful for about yourself and why? (I loved this one!)
- What food are you grateful for and why?
I found this adorable story to connect to the second question.
I am trying to be mindful about the amount of videos and screen time. I find it quite difficult to project my voice to the whole class all day long and sometimes just need to save my voice a little bit. It can also be a bit tricky to read a story aloud to the class without having a carpet to gather everyone. I just want you to know that I am cognizant of this!
Hello families, We had a great week in room 11! The highlight of our week was our field trip to Studio Bell. Students learned about sound, pitch, volume and rhythm. They had so much fun exploring different musical instruments! Thanks so much to the volunteers who were able to join us. This year we are also planning a field trip to the new SAM Centre at Stampede Park and the Zoo! I learned at Studio Bell that students do not know many (if any) Canadian musicians. So, during snack time we're having "Canadian Musician Appreciation Time" - we are listening to different Canadian artists and deciding if we enjoy the music or not. This week we listened to The Tragically Hip and Corey Hart (they had "the sunglasses" at Studio Bell). They also don't know The Beatles so we'll have to listen to some of their songs as well! This week in science we also wrapped up our learning about matter, including...
Hello families, My apologies again about not making a blog post last week! Here's what we got up to this week: We enjoyed spending lots of time with Elder Shirley on Wednesday morning. She walked students through a smudge and talked about some of the sacred medicines. She taught us how to hoop dance and how we can tell a story using our bodies and the hoops. We also enjoyed spending time outside with the hoops and some stuffed animal friends. We performed some hoop dancing for Ms. Zimmer's class and then enjoyed watching Elder Shirley perform some hoop dancing. We also met her mischievous bear friend, Lemon! We're continuing to learn about the Indigenous Seven Sacred Teachings. This week we learned about the teaching of honesty which is represented by the Sabe. Students wrote about a time when they showed honesty. We also read a story called Finn's Little Fibs by Tom Percival and students used loose parts to create a time when they fibbed....
Our first two days of school in room 11 were great! We enjoyed reading some stories together, getting to know each other and our classroom space, and students enjoyed exploring different work choices together in the classroom. We've also already celebrated two birthdays in the classroom! We had gym outside on Thursday and Friday and are looking forward to joining Ms. Zimmer's class for gym next week! We talked a lot about different expectations at school and why it's important to follow the classroom expectations. I always use my cat, Eli, to show listening expectations on the carpet. A notice from School Council came home today! (At least one was found on the ground so I just wanted to make sure everyone saw) Soft Entry We will be starting "Soft Entry" on Wednesday, September 4th. This means that students can arrive between 8:00-8:10 am, come through the garden doors and walk down to their classrooms. The teachers will be on supervision at the door, in the ...
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