Ms. Midgley's Blog

Hello families!  This week we re-visited the idea of being a classroom family. As a family we share a lot with each other and unfortunately sometimes that involves sad news. I am so proud of all of the students this week. I am surrounded by thoughtful, kind and intuitive little kids. They are all truly amazing and never fail to surprise me with their empathy and understanding. It is a privilege to be their teacher and our classroom feels even more like a second family. Thank you to any families that have reached out to offer support during this time.  This week I also shared some exciting (to me) news, as we do with our families. I am very excited to become an Aunt this summer as my oldest brother is having our family's first grandchild. I just want to clarify in case any students misunderstood who  is having a baby... We focused on words from the "-ag" family this week. And in math, we continued talking about doubles and near doubles.  We continued to work towards f...

Hello families,  I just wanted to let you know that we had a serious and sensitive conversation in our classroom today. Please check in with your child to make sure they are doing ok!  If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to send me an email.

Hello families!  We had a busy week at school - January is flying by! This week we focused on words from the "an" family. I am realizing now that I never posted the words on Google Classroom - my apologies! We learned a poem called The Tall Man and student again visualized what they saw when reading the poem.  This week we looked at another animal story called "What if You Had Animal Feet?" Students thought about how animal feet would allow them to survive the winter. Here are a few!  Students will be turning themselves into an animal that either adapts, hibernates or migrates to survive the winter. They will be giving themselves features of different animals to help them survive the winter. Students started a first draft of their designs and next week they will receive peer feedback before moving on to their good copy. They will also be designing a background for themselves that reflects how their animal survives the winter. Students learned about different texture...

Hello families & happy Friday!  We had a busy week back at school! If you haven't had a chance to read Monday's blog post, please read that one first!  This week we focused on words from the "-at" family! We brainstormed words together, learned a poem about a fat cat and visualized what we saw when reading, and even talked about real vs. nonsense "at" words. Students brought their poems home to share. Students had a choice today if they wanted to practice their words again, or try out a spelling quiz and several students wanted to challenge themselves with a quiz.  This week we also reviewed hibernation, migration and adaptation. Students sorted the animals using a chart, and we played a game to review afterwards. We also read a story called "What if you had Animal Hair?" Students then chose one animal from the story and drew themselves with that hair. They then had to write about how the hair would help them to survive the winter. We will do a...

Hello families!  Welcome back to school! I am so happy to have the students back in the classroom.  I wanted to share a quick blog with you today about a "new" word work program we started in the classroom - Weekly Words. It will be a little bit different than last year! Each week we will focus on a different word family. This program is not meant to be focused on spelling and the memorization of words, but rather to help students develop their reading skills, build phonological awareness, improve penmanship, explore rhyming words and even learn some poetry! For students that are needing more of a challenge, it helps them to learn about some of the more complicated spelling patterns (ie. prefixes, suffixes, doubling a consonant, etc.)  At the beginning of each week, students will be introduced to the new word family and will work with a partner to brainstorm as many words from that word family as possible. Today we started with "-at" words. We then shared all of our...