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 made it through our first (almost) full week of school! We are focusing a lot on learning expectations and building classroom community. We’ve been enjoying starting each day in circle getting to know our classmates. The pictures will be a little limited for the first few weeks until we have photo release information! This week we talked a lot about carpet expectations. We read a story called “Whole-Body Listening at School” and learned about Listening Larry. Ask your child how many parts of our body we can listen with… it’s not just our ears. You can also follow up with “Whole Body Listening at Home” if this is something you are working on at home as well! I also like to use my cat, Eli, to show carpet expectations! Whole Body Listening at Home This week we started some introduction lessons to the UFLI literacy program. We’ve been learning how our mouth moves in different ways to make different sounds. We also started learning about “sky, grass, dirt” letters
Hello families, We had a very busy week getting ready for our winter concert and our Calgary Humane Society fundraiser! Students love baking and packaging treats, making posters, and some students were even challenged to learn how to curl the ribbon! On Friday we used our skip counting skills to count up all the money we've raised so far. We've raised $666.85 and are hoping to break our record of $700 from last year! All of this work is connected to our health and wellness curriculum (volunteerism), social studies, science, art, math and literacy! Wow! Math In math we've been continuing to work with number bonds. This week students learned how to determine the missing number in a number bond when given the whole and one of the parts. This is a pre-cursor to subtraction! We used manipulatives and drawings to help us with this work! We also re-invented our Spider Legs math game to make it Christmas themed! Instead of drawing a spider and adding legs, students used a tree an
Hello families! We had a great first week of school! I have a goal this year to be a little more concise with my blog posts. We'll see how it goes! This week we spent some time getting to know each other. We learned about sharing circles and have started both mornings in circle getting to know more about one another. We are learning the importance of listening to each other and giving everyone a chance to speak. We also read the story "You're Finally Here" by Melanie Watt. We enjoyed re-creating the main character of the story. It was great to see students' cutting skills and their ability to follow each step of the activity. We talked about how the eyebrows can convey different feelings and can really change the bunny's expression. On Friday we learned a math game called "What's My Number?" we played teacher versus students and they beat me! Next week, students will play the game with their classmates. Fun Lunch School Council organizes Hea
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