Yum! Yum!

Our school day looks quite different this year from last.  We start at 8:45 and 

have a 'wellness break' from 10:05 until 10:10.  It is just enough time for

the little ones to have a bathroom break, wash their hands and grab their morning snack.

Keeping with our school district and school policies to encourage

healthy choices, the students are asked to find a fruit or a vegetable

to munch on each morning.

The natural sugars and the great source of vitamins keeps them learning

until after their playtime outside at 11:30.  They eat their lunch after

playing outside and we are back in class at 12:15.

Apples, carrots, cucumbers, peppers, apple sauce, berries, bananas,

grapes.....these healthy choices bring smiles to their faces!

Thanks for finding a way to encourage your child to eat really good food!

Working at centres

On Friday, the students had their first opportunity to work in pairs or small groups during our Language Learning time.  For the next few weeks, the focus will be on our English alphabet....the letters and their sounds, how they go together to create words, and how we should write them.

In the class, all modalities are explored....hearing, seeing and touching.

There will be students who prefer one over the other, but just right now, the students 

are exploring and finding out which one works best for them.

There are some students who like to work with a partner,

and some who like to explore on their own.  This is important too.

I have had a chance to work with each student individually and completed a

 book and print awareness assessment.  The students were asked to point out 

first and last letters in a work, first and last words on a page, where the title was,

which direction to read, what to do when you reach the end of the line and other such

information.  Sometimes we take for granted that our littles know these things,

because we have read to them for years.

It is important not to make assumptions.  Take the time to watch your child carefully.

Assist when you think that they are not really aware of the print concepts.

On Monday, the students will start their 'read at home' program.  Of course, they won't

be able to read the words right away.  Start with you reading, and model how to point under 

each word as you go along.  Have the students point and you read,  Have them

point out words that they know.  Talk about the period and its purpose.  If the

book follows a pattern, such as "I see a ____" help them to know that the picture

on the page will probably help them know that the last word is 'pig'.

Most of all, enjoy this cuddle time.  All too soon, they will be reading on their

own and you won't have the excuse to hold your little one so close.

A new year in Grade ONE!!

Welcome into our classroom!  This is where the magic happens and the lovely little students sent to school in September will be transformed into readers, and writers and mathematicians!  They will sing, and paint, and share, and learn so much in the next ten months!

Every morning (except Wednesday when I am on before school supervision) I will be greeting your child at the door to our room.  Here is the different ways that your child may choose to say "Good morning to me!

Yes, they are little and need so much encouragement, but you will hardly recognize them when the ten months are over.  One of the biggest changes you will see is in their level of independence.  They will change their 'mindset' from the "I can't" attitude to the "Of course I can!" belief in themselves.  Here at the front door are some of the words that we want to hear... "This might take some time", "I will need to practise", "I won't give up!"

This is an interactive white board, which I call a SMARTBoard.  It helps us to see things better,

we can show lessons on it, watch demonstrations, share ideas and do interactive games.

We have already started to read!  This wee we are reading five words"

I     and      the      see      a

We are practising these words in many forms at school and the students will have a yellow spelling duotang that they will take home each night so that they can practise spelling those words with adult help.  Perfection is not the goal....trying out best is!  Since these are 'littles' and this is all new to them, please be patient if they seem to forget quickly.  It takes at least 10 times of review to move new learning from our short term memory into our long term memory.  What your little one knows this week may not be remembered next week.  That's what practise is for!

One of the areas we are practising right now is making the English letters correctly.

First rule:  All letters start at the top.

Second rule:  Letters have to be the correct size.

Third rule:  Only the first letter in a name is written with a capital letter.

This is difficult for littles who have been writing their names in all uppercase letters throughout Kindergarten.  Help them when you notice them revert to their old habits.  It will take a while to change them!

This busy corner is my space, and I try to keep organized but  please be patient with me too!

I make mistakes often!

Our most important lessons will be about how much Our Father in Heaven loves us!

We start and end our day with prayer, and also pray before lunch.  We are going to learn many prayers, practise making the sign of the cross, hear stories from the Bible and find out that we are loved NO MATTER WHAT!

In this corner we gather to do many things: learn about the calendar, follow the days of the week and months of the year, count how many days we come to school, see patterns in numbers, work on a variety of independent centre activities and share information.

Along the back wall we are lucky to have a sink and a water fountain.  We have a whole shelf full of supplies to share and I keep units, craft and paint supplies here as well.

We have a word wall right next to the door into the small 'break out' room, which is used for small group or individual lessons.  This is shared with the classroom next to ours.  We covered the window with our photos which tell about our dreams for the future.

OOPS!  We have many students who are bringing water bottles (Hooray!) but there has been a spill almost every day.  Please look at the pink bottle.  This is a great one because even when it is opened, if it falls over, the water does not spill out.  If you have sent a water bottle for your little one that opens on the top like the other two please consider choosing one with a different type of safe opening.  Most of the spills have happened during the lunch time but if the water spills on students' work, I expect there will be tears.  Let's avoid that with a change in the type of bottle you send.

THANK YOU!

Another year over....look how they have grown!

It was a combination of the review of our unit on liquids, some chemistry

a little bit of vocabulary, and a whole lot of fun!  Today, our class explored

lemonade!

Every student had the chance to squeeze the lemon so that it could produce more juice,

and then, using a borrowed electric citrus juicer, each student got to squeeze half a lemon.

We watched as the empty measuring cup went to nearly full!

We looked up how to make old fashioned lemonade using a simple syrup.

This is where the chemistry came in.  We received the words dissolved

and evaporated,

We had a great conversation about how a stove works, watched the bubbles to understand the word boiling, and then let the simple syrup cool in the fridge.  To make a simple syrup, use equal parts sugar and water.

We knew we wanted to compare two different flavours, so strawberries were mashed and then added to one of the batches (new word to most of the students).

Each student got to taste each of the lemonades that we made together.

They had to remember which one they liked best because....

we collected data (using tally marks) to see which of the two flavours was most liked.

The data was first turned into a pictograph and then a regular graph.

Here are the results on our white board.

I just want again, to thank each and every parent for trusting your precious child to me.  I know that I didn't do everything right, but I sure did try my best to help your child on their education journey, with a great emphasis on Our Loving Father's guidance.  May they always know His love!

The children and I talked a lot over the last few weeks about being 'bored'.

Here's what we decided the students could do if they ever said that 'b' word during the summer:

a) visit the library and choose a book to read, cover to cover, a little bit every day

(That book should be a challenging one....not one that would be too easy....

they are great readers now!  Search for Big Nate, Junie B. Jones and Magic Tree House)

b)  practise using a keyboard....ask a parent about getting an app on their device, or being allowed to use the computer in the house, specifically to learn how to use all ten fingers to keyboard....it will be a skill that they will be happy to know how to do!

c)  Keep a journal for the summer.  Encourage at least 5 sentences everyday, keeping them using correct spelling, conventions and details along with interesting vocabulary.  Add some drawing.  Maybe they saw an interesting bird while you were camping....draw it and label its parts....or maybe you're made S'Mores....can your child write the steps on how it was done?

d) practise math facts....especially subtraction.  In Grade Two, the students are only required to 'know' the facts to 5+5 or the inverse operation so 25 - 5, etc.  The truth is that knowing all the facts addition to 20 and subtraction from 20 (that includes ones like 6 + 8 or 19 - 12) will make their math journey so much easier.  These are great to practise on road trips, on the way to hockey camps, playing various forms of card games, etc.  There are games on the computer for practising, but these are often too focused on the 'fun' of jumping or shooting after getting a few correct, rather than on the actual facts themselves.  How about a competition.....how many days before I know all the 8's or 5's.... or how to subtract any number from 12?

d) just be bored....let the child come up with something to do....it helps their imagination, it allows them to think outside of the box, encourages them to play with their siblings, or invite a neighbour from down the street to ride bikes or some other such summer memory creating moment.  Don't fall into the trap of being your child's entertainment or chauffeur.  Create a list together early in the summer of what you are willing to do as a family.  Do one thing on the list every few days....visit the zoo, have a picnic, walk to the spray park....but otherwise, encourage the child solve their problem on their own.  By the end of the summer, you will see a much more confident kiddo 

ready to take on the world! 

Sports Day

Look at these happy faces!  Thank goodness that God let the rain 

keep away for the afternoon.

They were 'super heroes in training'

This looks like potato sack racing....

Here is the bean bag toss...

and they also did some water balloons involved.

Here are the super heroes enjoying the freezies at the end of the 

day....

This was a cool activity where the kiddos were trying to stay away

from the 'boulder'..

The kiddos learned to put their hero clothes on in the 'phone booth'.

and then went to 'rescue' someone in the field.

Here is the aiming game....

They loved this one where they got to use the wet, wet sponge 

to fill the buckets but they went over and under....fun!

This was the ring toss where they tried to catch the 'bed guys' for points

This was the tug of war....the ground was so wet the board with the dowling

underneath that they were standing on was sinking into the grass.  

THANK YOU to all the parents who ran the stations.....you were the heroes!