Happy Friday families!
The past few weeks have been exciting and very busy! This is my favourite time of the school year. The students show tremendous growth and maturity as April arrives!
Following our Celebration of Learning, we have been working hard on our reading and writing skills. We have continued our Poetry unit and have learned so much about the structure and content of poems, such as alliteration and onomatopoeias! We also learned about synonyms and antonyms through hands-on activities and group work. Students have continued to engage in guided reading groups and have shown growth in utilizing reading strategies, fluency, and confidence. Finally, the students have been working very hard on their Reader’s Theater scripts and have proudly practiced with their groups in front of each other. They are very excited to continue perfecting their skills (annunciation, fluency, expression, etc.) and are anxious to perform in front of an audience!
We received letters back from our pen pals and we were SO excited to read them! We quickly read through our letters a few times and began our rough drafts by first answering their questions and then posing new questions to our new friends. We are currently working on our final drafts and they should be ready to send next week! I am very proud of the questions, the neat printing, and the overall enthusiasm expressed by my students! We will eagerly await new letters!
In numeracy we have finished our addition and subtraction to 10 unit and are working on exploring numbers to 100. We will be working on grouping large numbers of objects into groups of 2, 5 or 10 (more manageable groups that aid in counting quickly and more efficiently). They will learn that there are many ways to describe a number in terms of groups with some left over.
In health we wrapped our body systems unit by learning about the brain! We learned that the brain has many functions: it controls our movement, it keeps our heart and lungs and other organs working without us having to even think about it, it controls our emotions and senses, it keeps us balanced when we walk and ride a bike…it is the BOSS of our body! Without it, we could not function! Therefore, we learned that wearing a helmet whenever we play hockey, ride bikes, go skateboarding, etc. is SO important. We played a memory game to show the role of the brain in storing memories (short-term and long-term) and we also simulated the brain sending messages to parts of the brain via our nerves (and back again!) It was a fun unit!!
In inquiry we learned about food chains, added new definitions to our terminology wall (prey and predator) and have started to learn about our senses. We went out on the playground and used four of our five senses to observe the environment. We drew and labeled what we saw, heard, smelled, and felt. Today we explored our sense of touch by feeling objects in paper bags, drawing the objects we felt (without looking!) and describing what we felt. We discovered there are so many words we can use to describe objects: hot, cold, smooth, rough, hard, soft, squishy, sticky, spiky, slippery, curvy, flat, etc. Next week we will explore our other four senses through other hands-on activities! They will no doubt be noisy, “scent-y”, colourful, and tasty….
Finally, we had our very anticipated “Popcorn Party!” I am beyond proud of the students for all of their hard work practicing these high-frequency words since the beginning of the year. I set up several stations where the students played “popcorn word” games like “Kaboom!,” the cup game, roll-a-word card game, SWAT, and read-and-write-the-room. One of the stations was, of course, a popcorn and juice station. It was a busy afternoon, but the students were all engaged and were all demonstrating great knowledge of the words. It was a lovely ending to a busy day!
Have a wonderful weekend! Easter activities will take place this week–please read above^ for supplies needed for the week!
Ms. Holmes