Hello families,
Hope all is well! Thank you for all the mail, I have received almost all field trip forms now, however several were returned without the payment. If the $40 presents a hardship, please do speak to me. Otherwise, please get any remaining forms and $$ to me by Tuesday's deadline. Our first trip is only one week away!!! If you indicated your ability to volunteer on a trip, you will be hearing from me tomorrow, one way or the other. No jokes, almost every single parent was interested in coming on one or all trips! It pains me to have to turn people away, but we do have a cap both for transportation and cost reasons. If I haven't been able to put you to work this time, please consider emailing me to set up a time to volunteer in the class. We will also have a couple opportunities for walking excursions this year, and there will not be a cap on how many parents we can have! Thanks for your enthusiasm and understanding!
A couple days ago, you received your second social skills check-up. You'll recall that every month we do at least one activity where the main focus is our learning skills. This week, we worked with our brand new reading group members (see below), to build marshmallow and toothpick towers. During the activity, we were practising working as a team, solving problems independently and nicely, and following instructions (e.g., don't eat the marshmallows!). It was interesting that even in groups where individuals wanted to work on their own at first, over the 15 minutes, all groups kind of came together and started to discuss and support each other more and more. Hopefully this will continue as they work together on their reading tasks! Please review your student's evaluation and ask them how they think it went with their team!
While I do this, the other Clubs de Lecture have different group activities to work on, based on "The Daily 5" program, which I wrote about in my first day newsletter. One activity is listening to reading. All students have already had one or two turns doing this at the listening centre, but we will also begin using our classroom computers to listen to books. Another centre is working with words. This activity will change depending on what our class is learning about. It could be counting the syllables in a word, doing a word search, practising high frequency words using flashcards, finding and circling sounds within words etc. Right now, the task is to put a group of words in alphabetical order. Another centre is the writing centre. Here, the members of the Club de Lecture agree on a topic for writing and then each member works on one page of the short book, including an illustration and at least one brainstormed sentence. At the end, we assemble the book and they present it to the class. Finally, the last Club de Lecture will work on shared reading. Partners will sit knee to knee, elbow to elbow and read together, taking turns. We will work on partner reading tomorrow.
We will still be doing our regular independent reading regularly, but we will mix things up with these literacy centres at least once a week, Club de Lecture meetings with me being even more frequent.
This week, in math, we have started a unit on Patterning. So far, students have shown that they are quite at ease with repetitive patterns (using a colour rule, shape rule, or even two overlapping rules). Ask your student to make or draw you a pattern with a colour rule or even just any 2 rules they can think of, using the whatever toys you have at home (e.g., blocks, lego, animals....). Next, we will get into number patterns!
Our grade 1s were SO excited to start their first science unit! We are beginning with a unit on daily and seasonal changes, and we'll begin with seasons. Already we have started discussing some of the things we notice or do in the different seasons, and students each worked with a group on a poster for one season, and then presented something from their poster to the class!
Have a great weekend!