Sept 13-17
It is wonderful to see how well everyone is settling into the classroom routines and how excited they are to participate in our learning activities. Here is a summary of some of our work this week:
As a continuation of our work to build our awareness of classroom and school community, students worked to add details to their life-sized art and to add some words to share who they are with the other members of Tuscany School. We read the book “Say Something” by Peter H. Reynolds and had a discussion about sharing our thoughts, ideas, feelings, and values with others. Students then wrote a speech bubble to go with their people art in order to introduce themselves to others. I am working toward creating a short video next week that will be posted in the google classroom for you to see.
Please take a few minutes this weekend to go into your child's gmail account to accept the google classroom invitation if you haven't already. Student's will work through a variety of jamboards and google slides during literacy centres with a focus on simple and advanced phonic rules used for both reading and spelling, as well as having a quick link to get epic, instead of using the web to search for it.
We have been participating in literacy centres and building our independence with staying focused while working on reading independently, free choice writing, word work, iPad -literacy apps, Computers -Get Epic, and phonics games and puzzles.
As part of our Health curriculum is focussed on developing healthy relationships, we have been discussing positive and negative self talk and how it can both impact ourself and others as well as how we understand and connect to others. We have also been exploring the word empathy and how to understand and connect to others, who may be similar to different from us. One thing that helps us to empathize with people is to get to know more about them. With this in mind, I have decided that we will have a “Student of the Week” in our class starting at the end of September or early October. Each week we will choose a name at random and that student will be the “Student of the Week”. That student will share information about themselves, participate in some special activities and will have a chance to bring home a special backpack with a story and journal that they will share at home and then return to class to share with their classmates. To get ready for “Student of the Week”, each of the children are working to create a poster at school about themselves to share with their classmates. Last week we drew and wrote about our families and this week we talked about our friends. In the coming weeks we will write and draw about our favourite foods, groups we belong to and our favourite activity to participate in.
In our Science work, we are looking at the seasons and the environment of small crawling and flying animals. As our Summer season is quickly coming to an end, we got outside this week to sketch a summer tree. We talked about the differences between deciduous and evergreen trees and read the story Paint a Tree by Barbra Reed.
Math work continues to focus on counting and recognizing of numbers. We worked on our first “Counting Collections” activity with the grade one students. This is where students are given a bag with a number of objects and need to find an accurate way to count and record how many they have. Students in grade one will begin with organizing their objects into rows for accurate counting. Starting next week the Grade two students will be joining us to make it a whole class activity, working toward organzinging their collections into two’s, fives, or tens and maybe even using 25's, 50's or 100's (later in the year) to make counting quick and accurate. We will also be working on how to show our work in our Math journals. Students also played Race to 100, with the focus on how a hundreds chart works, recognizing dice dot formations, counting on accuartely to see who can get to 100 first!
In order to develop logical reasoning and problem solving, we are learning how to play mancala. We played again on Friday and the kids are having a great time learning how to get a second turn or to steal rocks from their opponent.
On Wedensday we were able to visit the Learning Commons for the first time. Students have each chosen one library book and they were given a large ziplock bag to protect their books. We will have library exchange every Wednesday. Please ensure that your child’s book is in their special bag as we want to prevent water damage to our library resources. I will collect books and bags earlier than Wednesday if you want to send them back to school before our library time.
Upcoming Events
Monday Sept 20 - Earth Rangers Virtual Presentation
Wednesday Sept 22 - Terry Fox Run - Toonies for Terry will be collected if you wish to donate
Thursday Sept. 23 - Virtual Open House - See my email for details
Friday Sept. 24 - No School for students - Virtual Open House
Tuesday Sept 28 - Coulee walk in the afternoon - volunteers required for this outdoor trip.
P.S. I've emailed those whose volunteer clearance is valid. If you don't have valid clearance yet, see my email to start the process sooner rather than later. If you haven't received any email about vounteering please consider starting the process, it lasts for 5 years and ensures that you don't misout on the one field trip you are able to attend because you don't have clearance.
Thank you!
