Wednesday, March 21, 2018

One of our new weekly routines is to have students read aloud to the rest of the class.  By doing so, the children are practicing monitoring their speed, enunciation, expression and volume.  Following a book, the audience is learning to give praise and constructive feedback.  Today, Arfin and Andrew read us a non-fiction book about earthquakes.

 At stations, we are working on using sequencing vocabulary, such as: first, next, after, then, finally.  The goal is to practice organizing our thoughts orally, so that we can move away from writing run on sentences that are repeatedly connected by the phrase, "and then."

In math, we have spent time this week delving into word problems.  We have worked on identifying key words such as, "in all," and also on representing problems visually when no pictures are given.  In the example below, Zahra used bar modeling to solve the problem.

Reminders:

• Tomorrow: Early dismissal 12:00
• March 23-April 3: No school 
• Fundraiser forms went home today and are due April 9.

Friday, March 16, 2018

The Grade 1 students in Ms. Petrie and Mrs. Lai's classes have spent the past two days building leprechaun traps.  After sketching our designs we went "shopping" for materials.

After collecting our supplies, we worked in our partnerships to build the traps.  Everyone demonstrated exceptional teamwork skills and engagement.

Here are a few examples of finished traps:

This morning we wrote about our traps.  We used the transitional phrases "first, next, then, finally" to explain the steps involved in building the traps.

We are looking forward to working more with our buddy class in the month of April as we continue on with our "building things" unit.

Reminders

• March 22: Early dismissal 12:00
• March 23-April 3: No school

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

We are getting closer to building our Leprechaun traps.  Today, we got together with our partners in Mrs. Lai's class to create a building plan and brainstorm possible materials that will be needed.  We learned that it is important to have a conversation with our partner and hear his/her ideas before sketching any designs.  When we drew our plan, we tried to include ideas from both partners.   Tomorrow we will finish our plans and then construct the traps.

In math, we are learning about number bonds.  That is, we know how to identify two parts and one whole to form an addition question (e.g. 5 (part) and 3 (part) make 8 (whole).  Soon, these number bonds will help us as we move onto subtraction.

Reminders:

• March 15, 16 and 19: Inline Skating (bring a helmet)
• Last call for recyclable materials!  Tomorrow we are building our Leprechaun traps.
• March 22: Early dismissal 12:00
• March 23-April 3: No school

Monday, March 12, 2018

We read a wonderful story today called "How To Trap a Leprechaun."  We were looking at the calendar and thought building our own Leprechaun traps would be a great engineering challenge.  We will be working with Mrs. Lai's class on this special project.  For homework, we are asking students to bring in supplies they would like to use for their trap. For example:

• Empty cardboard boxes
• St. Patrick's Day decorations
• Plastic containers
• String
• Popsicle sticks
• Egg cartons

Please send any available materials to class by Thursday, March 15.  

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

In math, we have been focusing on the "doubles plus one" strategy.  The photos below show how we move dots around on ten frames to rewrite equations as "doubles plus one."  The extension or challenge to this is "doubles plus two."  Ask your child to teach you how they find the answers to the following questions:  2+3, 4+5, 5+6, 6+7 etc.  

In addition to learning to strategies, we are also playing several new math board games.  These addition games are helping us recall our math facts more automatically.  Thanks to Mrs. Witczak for making them!

Reminders:

• March 15, 16, 19: Inline skating
• Please do not order Fun Lunch for March 16 (you can cancel up to 5 days ahead of time if you already ordered), as our inline skating is from 11:00-12:00 that day.
• March 15: Leprechaun trap project (please send in recyclable materials that we can build with, such as paper towel rolls, straws, jars, plastic containers, popsicle sticks, lids etc.)

Friday, March 2, 2018

In math, we continue to explore new addition strategies and practice communicating our reasoning and number sense.  Two of the strategies we focused on this week were: friends of ten (numbers that go together to make ten) and relating skip counting to addition.

To sum up our learning on the five senses, we have been creating journal entries using a number of different prompts and sentence frames.

Reminders

• March 6: Acorn Art forms due
• March 15, 16 and 19: Inline skating
• Please do not order Fun Lunch for March 16 (you can cancel up to 5 days ahead of time if you already ordered), as our inline skating is from 11:00-12:00 that day.
• March 15: Leprechaun trap project (please send in recyclable materials that we can build with, such as paper towel rolls, straws, jars, plastic containers, popsicle sticks, lids etc.)