Nov. 30-Dec. 3

Hello families, 

Happy December!

Please remember to complete and return the "Family Interview Homework" for Monday! Here are the 5 questions in case your sheet didn't make it home. 

1. Where does our family come from? What is our culture?

2. What does your name mean? (or who are you named after?)

3. What is important to our family? (languages, traditions, celebrations, values, etc.)

4. What groups do I belong to? (i.e. sports teams, Beavers/Sparks, etc.)

5. How does your family contribute to the community? (volunteerism, events attended, etc.)

Thank you for your support with this! 


This week, we started off by talking about active listening. Students took turns in partners talking about what they did on the weekend and then had to share about their partner's weekend. This also helped students generate ideas for their weekend journals. We talked about whole body listening, eye contact and body language. 

In math, we continued talking about 3D shapes. We learned about cones, cubes and rectangular prisms (or cuboids). We've been using the Montessori 3D Solids material to count up the faces, vertices and edges. This has been a little tricky for students but we are working together to develop strategies for counting up these attributes. We also began talking about addition and students made their own beaded number lines to help support them with addition and subtraction. Students in grade 1 are starting with a number line to 20 and students in grade 2 made number lines to 100. I was thrilled to see the excitement and students expressing how much the beaded number lines helped them with solving addition problems. Students had some different options for difficulty levels with addition. Next week we will start talking about different strategies for addition. 



When we have a few extra minutes, we have been practicing our skip counting by 2s, 5s and 10s. Students have been enjoying these Scratch Garden videos. We clap and count along! 



This week we started learning about some blends/digraphs including "th" and "sh." The Animated Literacy program we've been using has characters for some of these blends. You can find images on "The Thick Thorny Thing" and "Sheriff Shad and his Shaggy Sheep" on Google Classroom. Students wrote a word with "th" in it and added it to our chart. They also brainstormed 5 words they know that have "th" and drew these in their Word Work books. Students completed a colouring activity for words with and without "sh" and we will continue with "sh" words on Monday. 



Students had a great time building their egg shelters! Before building, we reviewed things that our shelters should include. Students are REALLY looking forward to testing them on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week. We will be creating observation journals for students to record their findings. We will also start talking about migration. 





This week we talked about complete sentences - this includes capitals at the beginning, punctuation at the end and including a subject and predicate, or as I like to put it "someone or something doing something." Students practiced writing full sentences and will be doing this again next week using the information from the family interviews. 


On Thursday afternoon, we took advantage of the beautiful weather and went on a community walk. Students had so much fun exploring the park for animal evidence. Students were observing different types of pine cones and trying to determine why they were different shapes and colours, some students were observing lady bugs, trying to determine what type of animal would live in a hole in a tree or looking up close at the markings in branches. 






Upcoming Dates

  • Monday, December 7th - Interview Homework "due"
  • All Next Week - Food Drive
  • Thursday, December 17th - Holiday Sweater Day
  • Friday, December 18th - PD Day No School

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