Oct. 19-23

 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 between now and Christmas time. 


In math, we had a "patterns quiz." We completed a quiz in small groups to see if students were ready to move on to a new topic! I don't want to send students into grade 3 never having experience with a quiz or test and hope that by introducing them earlier on and giving students some exposure to them early on, we can reduce test anxiety in the future. I let them know that this was mostly to see if I did a good job teaching patterns or not, and to help me understand what they still need help with! I learned that students needed a little more instruction about the core of a pattern so we discussed this and found examples as a class.

Today we started talking about shapes. We are going to start with looking at 2D shapes. We discussed the difference between 2D and 3D shapes. Each day we will explore a new shape and students will draw and label the shape, find objects in real life that are the shape, and think about what the shape has and doesn't have! Today we started with a circle. We noted that some of the videos call some things that are actually spheres a circle. I was pretty impressed with the students' existing knowledge about different shapes!



We have also continued to talk about Canada here and there and had some fun doing some Name Art for the front cover of our visual journal books! Here are a few!



At the beginning of this week, I introduced our new "Hard Work Hall of Fame." We came up with success criteria as a class for the Hall of Fame. I'm hoping this will encourage students to slow down, take their time, and put in their best effort.



Safe Play Outside

This week we also had to have an important conversation about recess expectations. We are finding that several students in our cohort (Our class, Ms. Brown's class and Mrs. Green's class) are not playing safely during recess time. There is a lot of hands-on, unsafe and unkind play happening. I felt that our conversation as a class went really well and students had a really good understanding of what is expected of them during recess time. I would really, really appreciate it if you could take some time this weekend to check-in with your child about the types of games they are playing at recess. Mrs. Green, Ms. Brown and I have decided that we need to be very consistent and firm in our consequences for not following these expectations. If students are being unsafe and unkind during recess time, they will have to walk with the supervisor during their recess instead of choosing their own activities. During this time, they will discuss appropriate and inappropriate school play, and find examples of students playing safely in the schoolyard. Depending on the severity of the situation, students may spend up to a week walking with the supervisor. Hand-on and violent behaviour cannot be tolerated at school, especially given the Covid rules and routines students have been asked to follow. Thank you in advance for your support with this important matter!


Students started music class again this week! We have welcomed Mrs. Proctor to LBS - she will be teaching music for K-2 students. Instead of traveling to the music room, Mrs. P comes to room 13 to teach music.

I finally got around to putting up our fall art and pattern art!




Have a nice weekend!

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