Ms. Midgley's Blog

Hello families! (I forgot to publish this on Friday - my mistake!) We had a great few days in grade 1! We have spent lots of time getting to know classroom routines and learning more about each other. Every morning we have had a sharing circle to share things like our favourite colours, the pets we have or would like to have, and what we have enjoyed the most about grade 1 so far.  We have read a few stories together such as: First Day Jitters, Our Class is a Family, Cat and Dog, and The Pigeon Has to go to School. The students enjoyed learning how to draw the Pigeon character using the video by the author and illustrator, Mo Willems.  Here are some of the drawings! Last year my grade 1/2 class loved reading Junie B. Jones books together so I thought I would try them again this year. We started reading the first one which is "Junie B. Jones and the Silly, Smelly, Bus." She is quite silly and mischievous! Last year we read 21 Junie B. books so I'm curious to see how many w...

 

Hello families,  This week, we have been working hard at our community project! Students finished up creating their communities and are working on brochures to share more information about their communities and convince people to visit their community.  This week we also continued to learn about bees! We watched a few videos, took some notes as a class, and had some great discussions!  For our math facts this week, we reviewed Fact Families and students did a great job! We also revisited measurement with non-standard units. Students chose three or more things to measure in the classroom and used either a paperclip, snap cube, square or playing card to measure. They then turned one of the items into a riddle (ie. I measured the shelf and it was 13 units long, what measurement tool did I use?). We had fun guessing the measurement tools of every student!  We have finished "Junie B. Jones is a Graduation Girl." It was suggested that we have our own graduation from grade ...

Hello families,  Happy June! Can you believe there are only 15 days of school left? I feel like we just started the school year! We had a very hot week! We struggled through the heat a bit, especially in the afternoons, but students did a good job staying focused on their work. We also had a lot of fun spending time outside!  This week students were challenged with some addition with missing addends for their math fact practice. It was a great challenge and our beaded number lines came in handy! This week we also practiced some skip counting! As a class, we have been learning about honeybees by reading books and watching videos and taking jot notes as a class. Students showed a lot of interest in learning about bees and wasps when we were learning online so I thought it would be nice for us to learn together!  This week we have been working on a project about communities! We reviewed the three types of communities: urban, suburban and rural. Students are working with a pa...

 Hello families!  Wow! It's been a very long time since I've written a blog. It was so nice to be back in the classroom with students this week! Seeing them in person definitely beats Google Meet!  This week, we focused on improving our writing and showing our best work. We worked on some mixed addition and subtraction and continued learning about graphing. We read a spring poem and students collected data about the number of different bugs in the poem. Students then created their own survey questions to ask their classmates and today we graphed the data. Next week we will look at our graphs, receive some peer feedback, and do a second copy!  We also spent the week practicing our Thriller dance for the surprise flash mob for Mrs. Jones. It was so much fun and Mrs. Jones was definitely surprised!  We spent much of this week getting back into our regular routine - 4 weeks is a long time to be away! During Daily 5 some groups played sight word games, and others con...

Hello families!  This week we started our week with a virtual field trip through the Arts Commons with Elder Shirley Hill. The students really enjoyed this session. We learned about Indigenous culture, music and dancing. We saw a video of Elder Shirley hoop dancing and got to dance in the classroom ourselves. We talked about the buffalo jump, language and got to ask her some of our questions!  This week we also worked on finishing our classroom land acknowledgement! This took a lot of work this week! Students worked in partners or a group of three to practice reading their sentence fluently and make up actions. We learned a little bit of sign language to incorporate as well! I unfortunately can't share this video with you but will be making another version with student voices and images without faces to share with you!  In math, we started talking about measurement. As a class, we brainstormed what we knew about measurement by thinking about - What is measurement? and Wha...

Hello families,  This week we continued to learn about our chick eggs and watch them grow. We enjoyed candling the eggs to see if they are growing. Some of them appear to be growing and some we could tell were not growing much.  For our physical education Minute To Win It challenge this week, we did an activity called "Flippin' Cones." where students had to flip a smaller cone and and have it land on a larger cone. This was very challenging! On Monday, as a class, we only got 3 cones on in a minute, but today we got 7 cones on! This week we have also been working on creating our very own classroom Land Acknowledgement. We started by going outdoors and thinking about what part of the land we connected with the most. Students then wrote their ideas on a sticky note and we grouped them by common themes. Each table group was responsible for writing a sentence based on the topic they were given (smell, animals, air, earth and trees). We then put the sentences together and talk...