We took some massive steps forward in our reading practice this week. We began literacy rotations! At the moment, Madame is training us on how to do each station ... listen to reading on the iPad and iPhones read to self with books that we select (even if we are just reading the pictures) word work, where we play with letters or build sentences using familiar words, and work on writing, where we copy out a “message du jour” and draw a picture of it. Once we have become confident in our stations and are able to get right down to work, Madame will start meeting with small reading groups at the same time. This process is a bit of a learning curve, but we are handling it really well! Even our Kindergarten friends have been doing a great job building sentences on their own with familiar words. An exciting literacy development for our Grade 1s this week was that our Big Buddies have now begun pulling them out during morning centres 3 days/week for reading practice. It’s a perfect pairing - we have 10 Grade 1 students and we usually will have 10 Grade 6/7 buddies that come, meaning that each Grade 1 student gets one-on-one, individualized tutoring. Every Grade 1 student has a designated folder for the Big Buddies to work through with them, beginning with alphabet sounds for those who need the review, working our way up through syllable practice, and then on to reading 1 syllable words, 2 syllable words…. and entire books! For our Grade 1 friends who are already reading at higher-than-grade-level, the Big Buddies have been pushing them into books that are slightly challenging for them, and then focusing their tutoring on one book only until the student becomes an expert at it and is ready to move on. They will also be challenging these Grade 1s by doing a daily review of more complex sight words. We are getting to know our Big Buddies quite well because they are also lunch monitors in our classroom every day, and even joined us for a Science lesson this week. Madame brought in some pumpkins and apples and our task was to work with our Big Buddies to compare them. Which is the tallest - the pumpkin or the apple? Which is the widest? Which is the heaviest? Which one will roll the fastest down a hill? We were quite excited about this last question and even took the pumpkins and apples out to Spirit Square to test our hypotheses. We were pretty evenly split on #teamapple and #teampumpkin. In the end, we discovered that the pumpkins roll the fastest because they are the biggest and heaviest. We had a special presenter come in this week to do an "optimism workshop". The workshop was in English and the presenter spoke to us about big words like "perseverance" and "resiliency". She told us some stories and gave illustrations to help us understand those big words. We each got to create a list of things that we CAN do, along with one thing that we can't do YET. In life, we are always learning and we can become good at anything if we're willing to practice it. We also had the opportunity to create "postcards" for our classmates, telling them some things that we really like about them. Reading the postcards that were made for us sure made us smile! We've been continuing to expand our musical horizons, as well. Some of us continue to practice the xylophone during centre time, and even write out music on our own so that we can remember how to play the songs we have learned. We're also loving the keyboard that Madame brought in. Max even told Madame today that she should come "catch this sick beat" that he was throwing down. (Future DJ, perhaps?!) It's fun to play with adding in drum beats, recording ourselves playing a song that we compose, and then playing it back. Bonus pics...
We had some fun creating mini explosions in Science this week! Mme Van Sickle had 3 "ghosts" (film canisters) with warm water in them. We decided to leave the first ghost with just the water in it, add a little bit of corn starch in the second ghost, and add a lot of corn starch in the third ghost. Madame showed us that she would be adding pieces of an alka seltzer tablet to each ghost and, as a class, we made a hypothesis that the ghosts would fly. Secretly, Madame thought that the ghost with only water in it wouldn't fly. But she was WRONG! As we were all standing there with the water ghost in front of us, Madame began to say, "So as you can see, the ghost with only water doesn't fly..." and THEN... it FLEW! Really high! Madame's hypothesis was wrong and our hypothesis was RIGHT! All 3 of the ghosts flew, but the one with a really thick liquid of corn starch didn't fly very high. We wrote down our hypotheses, recorded our observations, and wrote a sentence explaining the results. As a bonus, Madame let us try putting some Mentos into a Coke bottle for a similar explosion. In Math, we've transitioned to working on shapes. We are just at the beginning stages, getting to know the names of different shapes in French. Madame made up a ridiculous song, 90s-era-inspired, and we've been having shapes dance parties while we watch it. It moves FAST and there are a lot of words, but some of us are beginning to be able to sing parts of it. We've also just begun delving into the fascinating world of...PROBLEM SOLVING! We're learning how to highlight the important information (the numbers) in a sentence and how to make those numbers into an equation to solve for the answer. (Kindergarteners worked on a shapes colouring activity while the Grade 1s practiced this process). This week was also our first annual "Emergency Release Drill". A big thank you to all of the parents for being so accommodating and flexible. Things went really smoothly and it helped the school to figure out any kinks that need to be ironed out. It was an onerous but very necessary process. And we got lucky!...the rain stopped just in time for the drill! Most of us were already on our way home by the time it started up again. Bonus pics of classroom fun... (we've begun requesting that Madame take pictures of us so that our parents can see them):
We had our kick-off to home reading this week in the library where Mme MacKinnon read all of us primary students a First Nations book called "P'esk'a and the first salmon ceremony". She talked about the importance of not only reading the words, but also reading the pictures. The legos in the picture below represent the impact that consistent home reading practice can have on our reading skills. Just like learning to play the piano, kick a soccer ball, perfect a dance routine, or score a goal in hockey, we can only get better at reading with consistent practice. The yellow brick represents one day of home reading. The last set of blue bricks represents 5 weeks of consistent home reading practice. The obvious contrast between the first yellow brick and the last blue tower were so staggering that it made the children gasp excitedly. Anyone can become "a reader" - we just need to practice! Next week, Mme Van Sickle will begin sending home "home reading" book bags, each filled with fun French stories for us to browse through! We were all very excited this week to finally meet with our Big Buddy class for the first time! We were each assigned to a buddy and they read with us and helped us with the final steps of coloring our pumpkin art. (They were told to HELP us - not do it for us!) ;-) We will be seeing a lot of our buddies this year as they are super pumped to help out in our classroom with daily reading pull-outs for the Grade 1s, and as daily lunch monitors in our class. Our pumpkin art ended up turning out really well! We began on Monday by tracing the pumpkin with liquid glue and letting that dry. Then we talked about blending different colours of oil pastels together to create shading, giving the pumpkin a 3D effect (or, in kid language, making the pumpkin look "more real"). The kids should be very proud of their work! It was an art-filled week as we also began working on a painting project to create "art cards". The students' artwork will be turned into cards that can be purchased and given out on birthdays. Some of us had some more "modern art" interpretations of how to paint a birthday cake, but we all had fun creating them! Here is a picture of some of the art nearing its final stage. (We still need to outline it with permanent marker and write our names on it). In Math this week, we finished up our unit on patterns. We will continue to review patterns throughout the year, but will no longer be focusing on them. We decided to end with a big "hurrah" and create patterns with Froot Loops to wear around our necks. Some of the patterns didn't even make it out the door for recess, but others lasted the entire day! (...now that's will power!) We each held a sign to indicate the type of pattern we had created on our necklace. One of the highlights of the week was when Madame introduced us to our new classroom listening station. Thanks to some generous donations, we now have 5 devices (iPhones and an iPad) to listen to audiobooks of varying degrees of difficulty. Each recording has a physical book to go with it so that we can follow along with the printed text. The easiest books are all based on the alphabet and the hardest books are at about a Grade 3 or 4 reading level. At this point, we are allowed to listen to any books we want, regardless of our reading ability. We are just developing a passion for French stories! Madame also introduced a new centre to our play time rotations - sand! Some of us got really creative with it! And finally, to kick off our Thanksgiving weekend, we talked about what Thanksgiving is, how it started, and what we all do to celebrate it. We passed a sunflower around the circle and took turns saying "Merci pour..." (thank you for...) followed by something for which we are grateful. Some of us even managed to do the whole sentence in French on our own! We also learned a new Thanksgiving song.
It has definitely been a week FULL of spirit, with orange shirts, crazy hair, jerseys, pajamas, and funky outfits galore! ...all culminating in our Terry Fox Run today! Despite the dreary weather, the kids were troopers and had a lot of fun! In honour of Orange Shirt Day on Monday, we invited Mme Wear's class to our room to teach them a Katzie drumming lesson. We did a great job passing on both the drumming and dancing knowledge that we learned from the Katzie elder and remembering to say "hay čxʷ q̓ə" ('thank you' in the Katzie language). You'll have to ask your children how to pronounce that one. Tuesday was Crazy Hair Day, and also our "Forest Explorers" presentation. Our guest presenter taught us all about the different kinds of trees in our area and even took us on a walking tour of the school grounds and Spirit Square, identifying the different trees and recalling some legends of how the black bear got its name, how the douglas pine cone came to have its particular appearance, where the grey squirrels came from, etc. We all thoroughly enjoyed the time we were given with magnifying glasses to go exploring nature on our own. We even got to make animal prints in play-dough and then try to guess which animal the print belonged to. Some of us REALLY liked the print in the picture posted below and we made Mme Van Sickle promise to show a picture to our parents so that they could buy it for us for our birthdays or Christmas. (Mme Van Sickle has no idea where you would buy these commercially...maybe Amazon??) We've been continuing to talk about patterns in Math and Madame showed us how music has a lot of patterns in it, too! We played "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" on the xylophone and were able to identify the double-note pattern throughout the song. We learned about the difference between a "quarter note" and a "half note" and then got to try writing some of our own music by colouring in some notes. We had a great time trying to play the musical scores that we created on the xylophone. And continuing with the pattern theme, Mme Van Sickle was just a *teensy* bit proud (ok, "a lot" proud!) that some of the students figured out on their own initiative that they could make patterns out of the ball pit balls. Is that a tear of pride in her eye? (I'm not crying, you're crying). During "centre time" this week, we also drew out our creativity and created all kinds of interesting things with the random materials in our classroom's craft corner. And Mme Van Sickle showed us how to use the Smart Board to create artwork, as well. And here's a bonus photos, just because it's awesome! ...big buddies helping little buddies. <3
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