The Three Billy Goats Gruff

The children performed Reader's Theatre plays of the fairy tale, The Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Update from Ms. R

The homework for this week is for each child to teach an adult about tangram puzzles, then complete the reflection sheet on how the lesson went. This homework is due on Friday, January 31st.

Parent Notes:

1. Family Literacy Day - This year Family Literacy Day is on Monday, January 27th. For more information please visit https://abclifeliteracy.ca/family-literacy-day/ .

2. Parent/Teacher Interviews - Please know there will be no interview opportunities on the evening of Thursday, February 13th. However, I will be available for interviews between 8:30 am and 3:30 pm on Friday, February 14th. I will send out a sign up sheet at the end of next week for parents who wish to have an interview. (I can also arrange phone interview times.)

Important Dates:

January 27 - Family Literacy Day
February 11 - LAST swim class for the current school year
February 14 - Parent-Teacher interviews (8:30 am - 3:30 pm)
February 14 - P. A. Day
February 17 - Family Day
March 16-20 - March Break

News for January 24

Well, it was another four-day week, but the children were still busy learning more about polygons and geometric relationships, performing Reader's Theatre plays and creating decorations for Chinese (Lunar) New Year.

Math:  The class reviewed polygons and applied their knowledge to the shapes in the ancient Chinese puzzles called "tangrams". Each set of tangrams has 7 pieces, or tans, and the challenge is to place all 7 pieces in their correct places on a tangram design. The children practised solving tangram puzzles by moving around the desks in our classroom and solving 22 different puzzles. At first, it took up to 45 seconds to solve a puzzle, but after a lot of practice and sharing strategies, most children were solving the puzzles in 25 seconds or less. Later in the week, the students designed their own original puzzles and then they solved each other's puzzles. The children's original tangrams are now a part of a class book in our class library.

Reading/Writing:   A popular weekly activity is our "WWWWWW" or Weekly Wednesday Word Wall Word Worksheet, where children read and complete about a dozen fill-in-the-bank sentences using the word wall (spelling) words for the week. Of course, the students use this activity to practice reading, using and spelling the words, but it also serves as a general shared reading practice for the students because when the work is taken up with the whole class, the sentences are repeatedly read aloud chorally by all the students.

Writing/Science:   We began the next science unit on animals by doing a class research project on octopuses to demonstrate how to do research. The children wrote down their questions about octopuses and the students watched a video and heard a read aloud book about octopuses. By the end of the week, we were answering the questions using the information we learned. These facts will become part of a class book with children writing down the facts they learned. Did you know that octopuses have 3 hearts and blue blood?

Social Studies:   The class learned about the traditions and celebrations around Chinese (Lunar) New Year, that began early this year on January 25th. They learned about the Chinese zodiac tradition of a 12 year cycle with 12 animals representing each of the years. The year 2020 is the year of the rat. The students learned about the tradition of giving money in red lai see or lucky envelopes to children and unmarried adults on special occasions.  Did you know that one of the traditional foods are oranges with the green leaves still attached?

Art:  The children used their geometry knowledge to fold red lai see lucky envelopes and assemble them into lanterns to make decorations for Chinese New Year celebrations. These are now on display in the hall outside of our classroom.

Oral Communication and Media Literacy:  The children have worked hard on rehearsing the plays and their performances were recorded at the end of the week. These videos can be seen in a separate posting.

Books read aloud this week:

My Favourite Animal - The Octopus by Victoria Marcos
The Bremen Town Musicians retold by Ilse Plume
Celebrating Chinese New Year by Diane Hoyt-Goldsmith
Eight Ate - A Feast of Homophone Riddles by Marvin Terban

Update from Ms. R

The homework for this week is to complete the writing worksheet, reviewing poem interpretation and rhyming words and the math activity sheet reviewing two-dimensional geometry concepts. This homework is due on FRIDAY, January 24th.

Parent Notes:

1. It's likely that there will be a teacher's union job action on Monday, with a withdrawal of services on that day. However, please check the school board website https://tdsb.on.ca/ for further updates.

2. There is a wonderful, free website that helps children with reading. It is called "Starfall" (https://www.starfall.com/h/ ) and I encourage families to check it out and to look at some of the many other reading and writing websites and apps available for children to practice and improve their skills.

Important Dates:

January 27 - Family Literacy Day
February 12 - Term 1 report cards go home
February 14 - Parent-Teacher interviews
February 14 - P. A. Day
February 17 - Family Day
March 16-20 - March Break

News for January 16

This four-day week had the children learning about two-dimensional geometry, reading and interpreting poems and rehearsing their plays!

Math:   The class began the week talking about two-dimensional (2D) shapes. They learned about the features of math 2D shapes: sides, vertices (corners) and angles. The focus in grade two is on polygons or flat shapes with straight sides. We also talk about the circle, which technically is not a polygon as it is considered to be a flat shape with zero sides, zero vertices and zero angles. The children did an activity to prove that the more sides that are added to a 2D shape, the more it looks like a circle. The class practiced identifying and naming polygons, counting sides, vertices and angles and we even discovered that for ANY polygon, the number of sides, vertices and angles are always the same! (For example, a triangle has 3 sides, 3 vertices and 3 angles.) The class did a "shape hunt" around our classroom and found that rectangles are easy to find and shapes like pentagons are almost impossible. Rectangles are easy to manufacture, so most man-made items have rectangle shapes. The children also used "geoboards" with elastic bands to help them discover how to create polygons with different numbers of sides.

Writing/Reading:   The students started the week by reading the shape story of a fellow classmate and writing the student author a letter. In the letter, the reviewer wrote something nice, mentioned his/her favourite part of the story and then asked the student author a question. The authors then wrote the answers to these questions.

The children read a couple of poems this week and practised finding rhyming words. Rhyming words can be tricky because they may sound the same, but they aren't always spelled the same. We also talked about how sometimes poems can also be the lyrics to a song, as we learned the song to the Three Little Pigs poem we read. When the class read the poem, Winter Morning, we talked about how poems have fewer words than stories, so the reader has to do a bit more inference kind of thinking to understand what the poem is about.

During our read aloud time, we continued to talk about nursery rhymes and fairy tales. We also read aloud another version of the fairy tale, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but this version had modern designer furniture and chili instead of porridge!

Art:   The class began our glovetopus project! Making small soft sculptures called glovetopuses is a tradition in my classroom. A glovetopus is a little stuffed octopus made out of stretchy gloves. (The name "glovetopus" is a portmanteau of the words "glove" and "octopus".) This week the children stuffed their gloves and chose different coloured buttons for the eyes.)

Oral Communication and Media Literacy:   Each child now has a part in the play, The Three Billy Goats Gruff. The groups worked together to create the "credits" for their plays, including the title, starring and ending credits. The students picked out costumes to wear and had a chance to rehearse their plays on the stage that includes the bridge and brook.

Books read aloud this week:

Goldilocks and the Three Bears - A Tale Moderne by Steven Guarnaccia
The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns
Once Upon a Time: Three Barnyard Tales - The Little Red Hen, The Ugly Duckling, Chicken Little (now finished) retold by Marilyn Helmer

Update from Ms. R

Happy New Year 2020!

We started the year off with two new students joining our class in addition to the new student that came in December! So now we are a community of 23 student learners in Room 222.

The homework for this week is to write a fiction story about the picture of a Canadian $20.00 bill in the homework writing journal. Some ideas from the class were: a magic $20 bill granting 3 wishes, a stolen $20 bill and a $20 bill that's a magic carpet! There is also a math worksheet covering counting Canadian coins and even designing a new coin. This homework is due on THURSDAY, January 16th (since January 17th is a P.A. Day).

Parent Notes:

1. Picking up your child early:  If you are planning to pick up your child during the school day, please email me to let me know. That way, I can tell the office and I can have your child ready. If your child is in gym or music or outside at recess, locating and retrieving your child can take a lot of time.

2.  Cold weather gear:  Please make sure your child is dressed for the weather. Many children are forgetting to wear boots and snow pants. The general rule is that children need to wear snow pants when the temperature is 0 C or colder. Snow pants are not just for snow. They also protect your child from the cold and wet conditions outside.

3. Water bottles:  Children take home their water bottles each day to be cleaned and refilled. Having clean and full water bottles in the classroom allows easy access to water during the day and eliminates disruptions and time spent walking with a partner to the fountain down the hall.

4. School Library:  Our class visits the school library every two weeks. Many children forgot their library books this week. Students cannot take out another book until the first has been returned. Please help your child to return her/his library book, in the library bag, after they have read it. Our next library day will be Friday, January 24th.

Important Dates:

January 17 - P.A. Day
January 27 - Family Literacy Day
February 12 - Term 1 report cards go home
February 14 - Parent-Teacher interviews
February 14 - P. A. Day
February 17 - Family Day
March 16-20 - March Break

News for January 10

The first week back was a very busy one! We welcomed two new students to our class. The children continued to learn about Canadian money, they created artworks with pattern blocks and then wrote stories about their art and at the end of the week, the class started to rehearse a play!

Math: The students reviewed the features and values of the five Canadian coins in circulation and the old penny. They learned how to use skip counting, place value and hundreds charts to help them to count mixed groups of coins. Later in the week the students were adding two-digit money amounts. The children also reviewed some two-dimensional shape names as they used pattern blocks to create a repeating border pattern and to design a picture by tracing the blocks.

Reading:  The class is beginning to study fairy tales and nursery rhymes. We are collecting the features that make a fairy tale different from other fiction stories, for example, many fairy tales have animals that talk and act like people. Nursery rhymes have a long history and no one really knows who wrote them. Some nursery rhymes have been put into songs and some have clapping games that go with them.

Writing:  The students reviewed how to plan a story by doing some pre-thinking about the characters, setting, problem and solution in the story. Each child planned, wrote and edited her/his story based on the pattern block art that they created. After editing with me (and my trusty pen, Old Red), these stories will now be typed by me and put on display with the artwork in the hall next week.

Also our word wall is FULL. The children counted the words and there were 101 words! So each child created a personal dictionary with the Term 1 word wall (spelling) words in it, organized in alphabetical order.

Art:  The children used pattern blocks to create new art on paper. First, they traced the blocks with pencil to make a border pattern around the edge of the paper. Then they traced blocks to create a picture inside the border. To make the pictures clearer, the children outlined the shapes with black sharpie markers and finally, they coloured in the shapes with pencil crayons. Many students also used black markers to add extra details to their art. These will be put on display, with the typed stories, in the hall outside of our classroom next week.

Oral Communication and Media Literacy:   On Friday, the class chorally read the scripts to the fairy tale play, The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Each child then wrote me a short letter to let me know which character they would like to play. Next week, the children will be divided into four groups to rehearse the play and videotape the plays to create movies.

Finally, the class learned how to play the word game "Snowman" (formally known as "Hangman"). The children worked in pairs to guess word wall words by suggesting letters and if the letter was in the word that was written in the proper place and if the letter was not in the word, a part of an snowman was drawn. (This is a great game to play with your child at home too!)

Books read aloud this week:

The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson
My Very First Mother Goose edited by Rosemary Wells
The Gingerbread Man retold by Jim Aylesworth
Once Upon a Time: Three Barnyard Fairy Tales retold by Marilyn Helmer
Goldilocks and Just One Bear by Leigh Hodgkinson