Ms. Midgley's Blog

 Hello families!  October is coming to an end already! I can't believe it! I hope you all have a safe and happy Halloween! I did a terrible job with taking photos yesterday, so if you would like to send me a photo of your child dressed up this weekend, I can create a collage photo! I used my Little Red Riding Hood mask as inspiration this year!  This week we had a lot of Halloween fun! Students learned about the 5 senses and participated in activities about each of their senses that were organized by Mrs. Green, Mr. Link and myself!  We first looked at our sense of hearing and discussed how our hearing can be impacted and how this sense helps to keep us safe, such as an fire alarm or siren. Students had to guess the spooky sound, however it turns out that Mrs. Proctor, our music teacher, had used the exact same video with students. We are going to look at hearing again next week and will try to identify some new sounds. When discussing taste, unfortunately this year ...

 Hello families! Can you believe we are approaching the end of October already?  I have to apologize for not keeping the Google Classroom up to date this week! It has just been crazy busy around here and most days every students was at school, which is great!  This week we finished our letter review and began focusing on the vowel sounds. So far we have discussed long and short E and A sounds. My hope is that students in grade 1 will learn that vowels can make different sounds, and students in grade 2 will begin to recognize the vowel pairs that make these sounds. Here is a video that I really like for vowels.  In our Spooky Halloween Books, we learned the story behind mummies, Frankenstein and zombies. There are some great age-appropriate and kind of silly stories on Epic that the students have been enjoying.  This week we also talked a little bit about goals. We watched this video and student wrote about one school related goal they would like to accomplish be...

 Hello families! Here is an update from our week in room 13!  In math, we continue to learn about patterns. We will be wrapping up this work (for now) next week and we will return to patterns to learn more about number patterns at another time. Students have enjoyed exploring patterns through building and art, as well as identifying patterns in their environment. We continue to work on strengthening number sense. Students enjoyed playing some Halloween themed number sense games this week and can now use these as "Responsible Work Choices" when they are finished their Work Period learning tasks. "Boo Bump" has just one version but there are 3 different versions of "Catch the Ghost" with varying difficulties. Calendar is part of our daily routine! This is also considered a math concept. Students really enjoy learning about the days of the week and months of the year. Here are some of the songs we frequently listen to - the students love coming up with action...

 Hello families!  This week we continued learning about repeating patterns! Students built patterns and used patterns in their artwork. They planned their artwork first and had to include an AB, AAB, and ABC pattern.  I think they turned out so beautiful!!  We also started learning how to do Daily 5 literacy in the classroom. Each day, the tables rotate to a different literacy activity. So far it has been going really well! The "Work on Writing" group can choose to do creative writing or printing practice. The "Listen to Reading" group uses the iPads to go on Raz-Kids or Epic (I'll send Raz-Kids login info home next week!) If you are able to send headphones labelled with your child's name to keep at school, that would be great for this type of activity. The "Word Work" group gets different literacy games or Montessori literacy materials to use. Once students are able to do this work a little more independently, I will be able to read one-on-one or ...

 Hello families!  This week we continued talking about growth mindset. We also learned about Orange Shirt Day. Students designed their own orange shirts. Here are a few! We are continuing to discuss this important day and are focusing on the things that make us special and the fact that we are free to be who we are. This week we reviewed the letters K, F, B, G and C. I think B is my favourite Story Bots video! All of the characters are posted on our Google Classroom! We also started learning about repeating patterns. Students in grade one will focus on repeating patterns and students in grade 2 will also learn about increasing patterns. Grade 1 students will be able to learn more about increasing patterns as well, if they are ready! Our pattern activities from this week are posted on Google Classroom. Throughout the week we also worked on a collaborative poem. Each classroom in our school made their own found poem. We started by looking at three photos of our school/things rel...