The Primary division is planning a fun afternoon of working together to create natural ornaments to decorate our school tree outside. We will be spending some time outside gathering materials to make ornaments on Thursday. As a fun treat we are considering offering hot chocolate to the students upon our return. Please write in the communication books if it is alright for your child to have hot chocolate on Thursday afternoon. Thanks!
I can’t believe that it is December and the Advent Season is upon us! Time has really flown by. Thank you to those who have been sending in gently used toys for our classroom store. The students are very excited to start this activity but we are still in need of donations. Please take a look at home and see if there are some toys that could use some more play time. All donations for the store are requested to be in by Wednesday.
Also the items we are requesting for our Christmas Hamper have been written in your child’s communication book. Thank you to those who have already sent them in. I have also received almost all of the sledding permission forms. I will let you know the day before we go sledding so that you can send in helmets. Thank you for all your support during this busy time of year. Here is what we have been up to this past November. In math our focus has been on on sorting and graphing. The students have been exploring concrete graphs where they use actual items in order to show their data and pictographs where the data is represented with pictures. We have also been learning how to collect data with surveys. Finally we have been asking questions about what our graphs show us and exploring ideas such as most, least, how many and comparing the data. The students have been learning how to show their thinking during our math talks. They have been drawing pictures, ten frames, tally marks and number sentences to show how they have been solving basic math word problems. In December we will continue with data management, number talks and add in money as we explore Canadian coins, their values and purchase items for our Secret Santa from the classroom store. In our language blocks we have now incorporated our Read to Self time as one of our centers. The students are showing a real love of reading which is so great to see! For our journal writing time the students have been tasked with writing me a sentence. They are also working with a sentence checklist to ensure that they are writing Level 3 sentences and learning to edit their work to improve it before showing me. I have been seeing some great sentences and some are even starting to write me more than one sentence! We’ve added some short vowel sound activities to our working with words which will help us to hear the vowel sounds when trying to spell unfamiliar words. I have done a reading check-in with most students and made some adjustments to their Raz Kids reading levels. You will also see in this months assessment how your child is doing with reading our weekly word wall words. Please continue to practise these at home as it will help your child progress with their reading. In science we explored winter and continue to discuss what the animals are now doing if they did not migrate south. In combination with Art, the students are currently working on creating a diorama with a partner showing a winter scene with different animals. We had a great presentation about the Seven Grandfather Teachings done with traditional storytelling. Health and media were combined this month which allowed the students to explore making a poster. You will see their work on SeeSaw. In Physical Education we continue to play Newcombe ball and the students spent a week learning about tennis. Finally in Religion we have learned about how important keeping your promise is and that God has kept his promises to us through the story of Noah and the Ark and Moses. I will be sending home this month’s math and language assessment. Please review the work, sign and return it. As always if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me. |