News for September 20

News for September 20

This week the students continued to learn the daily and weekly classroom routines.

The class worked with the weekly Word Wall Words to learn how to spell them. They chanted, clapped and stomped their ways through all the letters. Then, on Friday, we had a spelling test. Now the weekly words are on the class Word Wall and the students are expected to spell these words correctly in all written work.

The class learned a game called "Making Words" where the students move around paper letters to make all different kinds of words. This helps students learn the rhyming and spelling patterns of word families.

In math, the children continued to talk about math strategies. We've been focusing on making 10, double facts and doubles plus one. The class also reviewed the four steps to properly answer a word problem (pictures, number sentence, word sentence and of course, the correct answer). Finally by the end of the week, students were using the groups of 10 strategy to count large number of objects (cubes and the number of happy faces drawn in two minutes). They then transferred this knowledge of groups of ten to the understanding of place value (tens and ones).

The class learned a song based on a poem by Shel Silverstein called "Boa Constrictor". The actions and words had the students laughing and giggling at this funny song.

In writing, the students completed books based on the penny stories they wrote last week. Each finished book had the story, an illustration in coloured pen, a cover design with rubbings of pennies and finally included in a small cardboard frame was the penny that inspired the story. The children had a chance to begin writing a fictions story based on animals, places and objects of their choosing.

The children finished their paintings by adding outlines and details with black Sharpie marker. As a continuation of our discussion of line as an element of design, the black outline of a figure really makes the drawing "pop". After, each child wrote an art reflection about the materials they used, what they thought was best about his/her painting and a sentence describing the picture's story,

And finally...the class had a chance to play charades, the classic drama practice game. They all had a great time reading the sentence on the card and acting out the sentence for the other students to guess.

Before our Terry Fox Run on Friday, the class watched a movie about Terry Fox to learn a little bit more about him. Did you know that Terry Fox received a medal called The Order of Canada to recognize his brave "Marathon of Hope" to raise money to help find a cure for cancer?

The class is now decorated with some name art. The students learned the steps to create a border and each child created a large version of his/her name, surrounded by decorated borders using white chalk on black paper.

In library, the class watched a video version of Robert Munsch's Blackberry Subway Jam with songs (different from the book we read which had no songs!) Here is the link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VaHxXpmFyE

Books read aloud this week:

Terry Fox by Bryan Pezzi
Jonathan Cleaned Up or Blackberry Subway Jam by Robert Munsch
Arnie the Doughnut by Laurie Keller
The Pencil by Allan Ahlberg
The Little Red Pen by Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel