Thursday Blog

 Reminders

• October 9th: PD Day - NO SCHOOL
• October 12th:  Thanksgiving - NO SCHOOL
• October 14th:  Picture Day
• October 29th:  Costume Day
• October 30th:  PD Day - NO SCHOOL

Parents, it might be a good idea to put a change of clothes in the bottom of your child's backpack so that if an accident happens, they have something to change into.  Sometimes the children are too busy playing in gym or at recess, and by the time they realize they need to go to the bathroom, it's too late.  

Next week your child will bring home 1 library book and a bag of home reading books.  Please keep the home reading books at home all week and have your child practice reading their books several times.  This allows them to practice fluency and expression.

Here are some notable activities from this week.

• During Language Arts, we are reviewing the graphemes (letters with their sounds).  This is a good review for all students as they it helps them be more aware of letter sounds when they are reading and writing.  This week we reviewed the letters; l, m, n, and p.  Along with reviewing the letter names and sounds, we are also learning/reviewing how to print the letters properly so that their printing becomes more efficient.  Remember, we always start printing a letter from the top. Here are a few fun videos we watched to review letters sounds and printing.  Please review these letters and sounds if your child is still learning their letters and sounds. The last video on the list is has actions to go with the graphemes, which we review every day and just add one more letter each day.
•  Letter l Song
• Letter m Song
  
• Letter n Song
  
• Letter p Song
  
• Graphemes with gestures
  

You can also find all the videos for the letters and grapheme gestures on my Google Classroom site.  Children can sign in with their gmail and password.  The classroom code is: rl3yblc 

Students are practicing reading and writing sight words.  Your child knows which colour group they are in. Have them practice finding these words in the books you are reading together.  

Red Group:  he, dad, help, mom, girl.   

Blue Group:  for, this, with, was, his. 

Purple Group:  above, avenue, move, twelve, have

This week we were working on retelling stories.  We have used the words, "First, Then, Next and Last" as prompts for their sentences.  When reading stories to your children, have them tell you the main events/ideas that happened and in the correct order.  We also talked about asking questions to deepen our understanding of the book.  Here are some types of questions we are practicing.

• In Math, we have been practicing skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s.  We have continued to practice subitizing small sets of objects or the numbers on dice.   We also have started looking at ordering numbers. We talked about reasons why we order numbers, and even made our own number line! We were given the task of putting numbers in order on a number line from 1 - 20, but some of the numbers looked a little different! Make sure to ask about the number line we made this week.

• In Social Studies we began exploring the question, "What stories do I have to tell?" We began the exploration of this question with me sharing a little bit of my grandparents' biographies.  We learned that we can learn about a person's life such as where and when they were born, what their life was like, and important events that happened in history at that time or that happened to them.  We have come up with some questions to ask a family member during this long holiday weekend.  Please take some time to help your child answer these questions. Help them write down the answers and then they can bring them back to school to share with their classmates.

• When and where were you born?
• What elementary school did you go to? What was your teacher's name?
• What was your favourite...? (food, toys, TV show)
• When did you or your family come to Canada? 
• How old were you when you came over to Canada?

• In Science we have continued to learn about the needs of small crawling and flying creatures.  We concluded our first guided research on ladybugs and are now going to do another mini research on butterflies.  The students started by listing all the things they thought they knew about butterflies.  Then they asked questions based on what they still wanted to know.  

• This week in Art, we created Turkey's in honour of Thanksgiving.  We learned about sketching and mixing colours as we did this.  Check out some of the results!

Ask Me About

• What were some interesting facts you learned about Mrs. Andrews' grandparents?
• Practice skip counting by 2, 5, and 10.
• What do I want to know about butterflies?