News for September 16

News for September 16

The first full week of school had the students in Room 204 doing lots of different activities!

In math, the children reviewed the cardinal numbers 0-100. Each child created his/her own 100 chart and as they wrote the numbers into the grid, they noticed the patterns. For example, all the numbers going down a column have the same digit in the one's place. We also looked at odd/even numbers and practiced skip counting by 2's, 5's and 10's. (We also looked at skip counting by 25's, 50's and 100's). The students used what they know about skip counting to quickly count large groups of items.

In writing, the children finished writing their first stories of the year. After planning the stories and writing the rough draft, each child edited his/her story with me. I then typed each story and the students stapled the published stories to black construction paper to be displayed with their paintings in the hall outside of our classroom.

The class practiced writing sentences beginning with capital letters and ending in periods or questions marks. They also learned about how to recognize rhyming words.

The students worked in partners to write "cooperative stories". Using a die and different coloured pens, the partners rolled the die and only wrote the number of words that matched the number on the die. For example, if a five is rolled, the student writes the next 5 words of the story. The result was some very funny stories! Finally, the children gathered on the carpet and shared their stories as a group.

The class learned how to fold origami paper elephants. After learning a bit about elephants (did you know they are the largest land animal on earth?), I read them an article about how 35,000 elephants are hunted each year for their tusks. The Wildlife Conservation Society is trying to beat a Guinness World Record to assemble together the largest number of origami elephants ever, to bring attention to this problem. We managed to fold 152 paper elephants on Monday to mail to New York City to meet the deadline.

In science, the class learned about the reasons for the seasons and why we have both warm and cold weather in Canada. It's because the earth is tilted! The earth takes one year (365 days) to make a trip around the sun. For half the year, Canada is tilted toward the sun, so we have warm weather in spring and summer. For the other half, Canada is tilted away from the sun so we have cooler weather in fall and winter. The students heard a read aloud book about this and saw a video. Here is the link:

https://shar.es/1xfzCi

After hearing a read aloud story, the children discussed, then wrote about, the four main parts of a story: characters (who?), setting (where? when?), problem (what?) and solution (how?).             

The students did a Reader's Theatre activity based on the nursery rhyme Old Mother Hubbard. This type of activity has the children doing repeated readings of text to improve their reading fluency and expression. The class worked in groups and then presented their plays in front of the class. At the end of each presentation, the children discussed what went well and what could be done next time to improve the group performances.

The students reviewed the parts of a book and then made their own books! They learned how to fold an origami book and each student made several models. They then got creative and filled the books with their own pictures and stories.

Books read aloud this week:

Life Size Zoo: From Tiny Rodents to Gigantic Elephants by Teruyuki Komiya

DK Braille: It Can't Be True by DK Books

What? Cried Granny by Kate Lum

Pig Pig Gets a Job by David McPhail

Books! By Murry McCain

The Reasons for Seasons by Gail Gibbons