Ms. Midgley's Blog

Hello families,  Happy March Break! I hope you all have a restful break!  This week we enjoyed the warmer weather and celebrated the Spring Equinox. We learned from Elder Saa'kokoto (an online presentation from the CBE) about the gifts of springtime.  This week, students practiced some writing skills to share what they did over the weekend. During our small group Daily LA time, I worked with students to add more detail to their writing. We talked about the 5Ws (who, what, where, when, why) when writing to try to "paint a picture" in the reader's mind. We also continued learning about nouns, adjectives and verbs. Students were introduced to some of the Montessori Grammar Materials. We use a large black pyramid (first manmade structure and colour of the first mineral - coal) to represent nouns, the medium size, dark blue pyramid to represent adjectives, and the red sphere (shows movement and fire which has energy) to show verbs. During our morning work task, students we...

Hello families,  What a week! I have never seen so much excitement around St. Patrick's Day. I have to admit that I'm glad I caved on the leprechaun traps! Ask your child about all the nonsense that happened in our classroom on St. Patrick's Day! Students enjoyed learning about engineering. Ms. Gierl's husband visited her class to teach them bout engineering and although he wasn't able to visit our classroom, we were still able to learn through him as well. Students designed blueprints and build their trips based on their plans.  This week we learned about verbs and reviewed adjectives and nouns! Students enjoyed going on a verb hunt by looking for verbs in stories. Next week we are  going to be working with the Montessori Grammar Material.  We continued with our math groups this week and students worked on different skills including addition with regrouping using the Montessori Golden Beads. We also continued learning about the counting on addition strategy. During...

Hello families,  Happy Friday! Here are some updates from our week!  This week in math we practiced our counting on addition strategy. During our morning work, we also reviewed greater than, less than and equal to. We also started using open number lines to represent addition. We continued with our math groups as well - I've really been enjoying the small group math work and using our materials a little more.  In literacy we learned about the "kn" sound. This technically is not part of the grade 1 or 2 curriculum, but it was coming up a lot in the classroom so I wanted to address it. Students do not need to know when they are writing if a work is just n or kn, but hopefully when they are reading they will remember that the k is silent!  This week we also started talking about nutrition and eating habits! We talked about our favourite foods and what would happen if we ate them every day. We also played a game similar to charades or headbands where a student had to gue...