The students began the week with an assembly with Mrs. Farrelly to review the rules of behaviour in our school.
The class had the first word wall words for the year. Each week, the students will study a list of words, that become part of our class word wall. These words are a mixture of irregular words, homophones and word families. Once they become part of our word wall, it is expected that the words are spelled correctly in all writing activities (and, as the students will tell you, "for the rest of my life!")
The students now have a Class Jobs chart. Each week, children take turns doing jobs around the classroom like feeding the fish and taking the attendance down to the office.
Our first big writing assignment is now complete. The students wrote stories based on their paintings and the stories were typed and are now on display in the classroom.
The class welcomed three new fish to the class aquarium. We now have Alpha (a tetra or tetragonopterus), Beta 1, 2, & 3 (platy fish) and George (a pleco or plecostomas). The students each began to write a non-fiction story about our class pets.
The students began a weekly project where they learn, and also teach, new American Sign Language (ASL) signs. This week's words were yes, no, hello, goodbye and thank you. The video they made can be found at the end of this blog post.
We were very lucky this week because one of our interpreters, Wendi, brought in two of her pet reptiles to visit with the students. Gill is a bearded dragon and is 45 cm long. John is a mountain horned dragon and is 21 cm long. Thanks so much to Wendi for sharing her knowledge with our class!
In math, we learned about Roman Numerals. This was the number system until the 14th century when our current number system, Hindu-Arabic numbers, became popular. The students learned the numbers 1-12 because one of the ways to write the date in our class uses Roman Numerals for the months of the year. So since there are 12 months of the year they learned (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X ,XI, XII). Then students reviewed the use of number lines, how to count on a number line and how to estimate number placement on different types of number lines. We also reviewed the concept of place value. First we played a game demonstrating how to use groups of ten to count large numbers of objects. The students chanted "the value of the digit depends on the place that you put it". Because the value of the number 27 is very different from 72, depending on where you put the 2 or the 7.
The students had their first visit to our school's library. Students are allowed to take out one book per week. Day 5 is our library day (currently on Mondays but that will change after Thanksgiving!) Ms. Miller is our librarian since Ms. Mantello is on a medical leave. The children wrote letters and drew pictures as "get well" cards for Ms. Mantello. These letters were mailed to her this week.
The class began a big art project this week...sewing pillows! The first step was to design the fabric for one side of the pillows using brightly coloured fabric paint.
In our guided reading groups, the students read and talked about the traditional poem "Days of the Month" to help them remember how many days in each month:
30 days past September,
April, June and November,
February has 28 alone,
All the rest have 31,
Excepting leap year,
That's the time,
When February's days are 29.
(This poem is over 500 years old!)
Books Read Aloud This Week
The Mystery Glove by Nick Page
Fish Out of Water by Helen Palmer
My Life - Terry Fox by Bryan Pezzi
I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff
The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes (chapter book)
Learning ASL With Room 5 - Episode 1
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