Happy Long Weekend
Happy long weekend, y’all. However you spend this long weekend I hope you are resting and enjoying with your family and soaking up the Sunday sunshine.
We ended the week on a high, celebrating our group win with an ice cream party, courtesy of Shifu 🙂 We ate ice cream sandwiches and watched the short film adaptation of the book ‘Room on the Broom’ (knowledgekids.ca). Lots of fun and a nice time to connect and reflect on how we earned stones for our group plan jar– the Group Plan is a way to talk about doing expected behaviours, noticing what the group is doing and joining in. (i.e., if we are all sitting on the carpet listening to a story, that’s the group plan).
In literacy this week we started our spelling program, which is a great program called Word Play. Some of you may have been introduced to Words their Way and it is very similar. We look for patterns within the words, sorting them. If you know bat, you also know mat, sat, that….and you will also know ‘caterpiller’ and ‘patted’ at some point! We are just getting into the routines of this program. There is some spelling practice coming home, as I mentioned in my email. No pressure, we want spelling to be playful and fun and having a feeling of accomplishment.
We have also started ‘Story Workshop’, which is just the most fun. The students were given a selection of fall materials- leaves, pinecones, sticks, wooden buttons and cutouts- and they created the most marvelous stories! It was just the best. Part of Story Workshop is documenting the stories. If you decide to download SeeSaw that will be a good place to post some of the audio files or videos. It’s such fun!
In Math we have been exploring number sense and place value, using some dice games and counting in tens. Any kind of counting where kids are regrouping 10s at home will be a great complement to the work in class.
We have also been starting a reading comprehension strategy called ‘Activating Prior Knowledge’ or Schema. This strategy is a great foundation for beginning readers. I love a website called ‘Into the Book’ which introduces reading strategies. At home a way to support this strategy is to look at a book and brainstorm before reading: what do I know about this book or the content? What experience do I have? What have I read about before that might be similar? And then read, read, read! More reading with families encourages a love and curiosity of reading and books. This is the foundation for becoming a good reader!
It is difficult to get a lot of photos for the blog as I don’t post student’s faces, so thank you for your understanding with the few photos posted here! A few pictures of our days below 🙂
Please remember library is TUESDAY, so pack books from last week to exchange on Tues a.m.
Also, we are going to be building a project next week with boxes- please bring in boxes– amazon boxes, cereal boxes, the more interesting the better. Thank you!
