Pen Pals!

Yesterday our surprise was revealed!  We are now Pen Pals with a grade two class at Arcola Community School!  We were able to FaceTime with Miss. Patterson’s class and the students were thrilled.  We had generated many questions to ask them beforehand and were pleased to learn that the grade two students had very similar interests as us and our school had some similarities to ours! Once we ended the video chat, we talked about the structure and content of a letter.  We then wrote our first drafts (our rough, practice letters) using some of the questions we had generated earlier.  Some of the students wrote two FULL pages for their pen pal! It was amazing to see the enthusiasm on their faces and in their writing.  Sometimes it’s easier to sit down and write when there is a real person on the receiving end.

This week we continued our Mo Willems author study with Ms. Perkins’ class.  We will be wrapping it up next week! We will be starting our guided reading groups next week which will combine some of Ms. Perkins’ students with my students.

In numeracy we are working on basic number sense concepts such as counting forwards and backwards, grouping numbers so make counting large amount of objects easier, building numbers different ways, and counting on from a given number.

In health we have been discussing emotions and have been working on “My Feelings” booklets.  While discussing the many different emotions people can have, we have also explored appropriate ways to deal with them.  Anger, for example, is okay to FEEL, but it is NOT okay to hurt other people when we are mad.  We discussed ways to deal with anger, such as go to a quiet place to calm down, exercise, talk to someone you love, etc.

Finally, in inquiry we have been watching short educational videos about bats and have been reading books and magazines to pull out information about bats.  We have narrowed down our research categories to “habitat,” “food,” “physical appearance,” “types of bats,” hibernate/migrate,” and “interesting characteristics.”  These categories may change as our research continues.  We have decided that at the end of the research project that we will create our OWN non-fiction book to help educate others about bats.  In order to make our own book, we analyzed non-fiction books for content and design.  We learned that non-fiction books have real facts/information, real pictures, diagrams, maps, table of contents (which tells us what page you need to turn to to find certain information,) and a glossary (which tells us what words in the book mean.)  We are excited to continue our research next week!

Have a wonderful weekend!  Just a reminder that there is no school on Friday (Jan. 20).

Ms. Holmes

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