Ms. Midgley's Blog

Hello families,  Brrrr! What a cold week - we had to spend lots of time indoors this week and we are missing our fresh air breaks! I hope you get to spend a little more time outside this weekend!  In math we are beginning to learn about addition strategies. We discussed what strategies are and why they are important. They are important because they help us solve problems more efficiently and can help us to communicate our thinking more clearly. This week we started learning about counting-on! We also started doing math groups similar to the Daily L.A. groups.  In science, we continued talking about temperature and states of matter. We learned about solids, liquids and gasses and enjoyed coming up with examples of each one.  In social studies we began learning about communities. We learned about communities and landmarks within our communities. Next week we are looking forward to going on a community walk, likely on Wednesday. I will send a School Messenger on Monday ...

Hello families,  We had a short but busy week! On Monday, we drew names for our Secret Valentines exchange and students worked hard to create a thoughtful card for one of their classmates. On Wednesday students exchanged their cards - it was so sweet! All of our morning tasks were themed this week around football, Valentine's Day and the 100th day of school. This week we also did some Valentine's Day math review with skip counting, addition and comparing numbers. To celebrate the 100th day we did a math and art challenge where students had to create an underwater scene with 100 sea creatures - it was interesting to see how they organized their work, how they worked in a group, and how they managed to keep track of the number of animals.  On the 100th day, students also brainstormed what they would buy if they had $100. I'm glad they are realistic about the price of fruit and vegetables these days.  In literacy we enjoyed making words with the letters in Valentine's Day ...

Hello families,  This week we made a few changes in our classroom! I was itching for a bit of a change and re-arranged the classroom a little. We also decided to start our mornings a little differently. Each morning students have a literacy and numeracy activity to complete. This week we did word scrambles and number bonds! They can choose between the mild, medium or spicy difficulty levels. Students enjoyed using the moveable alphabet to unscramble the words, and various math materials to help them solve the number bonds. In literacy, we learned about the "ing" sound and talked a little bit about the rules for how to add ing to a word. During Daily L.A. students worked together to build as many ing words as they could.  We also learned about nouns and students created a list of nouns in the classroom! This video talks about common and proper nouns which we discussed a bit but haven't focused on yet.  We have really been enjoying using  the program  Spellie . St...

Hello families,  This week we had to re-visit the idea of Whole-Body Listening with Listening Larry. We connected this to the sacred teaching of respect. If you like this idea and want to follow up with "Whole Body Listening at Home" I will share the story below!  Whole Body Listening At Home:  https://video.ibm.com/recorded/126399462 This week we worked on some art for our seven sacred teachings. Stuents chose the teaching they feel most connected to or they feel is most important. They created artwork with water colour and paper and then explained their reasoning for their sacred teaching choice.  In math, we continued working on addition. Students completed a pre-assessment to see how they are able to represent addition in different ways. We are going to be continuing this work for the next little while. Students also created their own February calendar to help them stay on top of our very busy upcoming month!  Students also learned about the 'ng' sound. We d...