It's been a good week back at school. We've been reviewing our rules and routines, and especially how to be really good listeners. We had lots of graduations in our borrow-a-book program, so it's clear many of you have been working hard. Keep it up! We have a lot of cool stuff coming up and report cards are just around the corner as well so stay tuned!
Yesterday you received another note about the snack program. As you know from the fall, the snack program depends on parent contributions and the amount of food we receive on a daily basis reflects the amount that we are able to donate to the program. If you are able to make a donation, we would be grateful.
In math, students have now completed their own diagramme à bandes, without the aid of a template. They had to use plain graph paper and draw their own axes, add their scale and choices and think about their data. We know that a bar graph is meant to help us organize what we know, so students are working on making straight lines using rulers and colour coding their graph to make it clear and easy to read. This time, students worked on rearranging our December weather graph to show what it might look like had we done it in summer time. I've never asked grade 1s to create their own graph from scratch, so it was really neat to see them do it pretty well after only 2 days introduction!
Today we finished up the art project we began in December. We painted over our careful pastel work yesterday and today we used blocks to scratch almost all the paint away, making the finished product look old. Here they are:
You've no doubt heard that yesterday we had our first piano lesson. We learned about how to sit properly and how to hold our hand so that we don't get stiff fingers or wrists. Ask your pianist to show you proper hand position. The first thing we are learning to play is a 5-note scale. The songs we will learn will use these notes. Using the right hand, and placing finger 1 (thumb) on middle C, we play 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1. Ask your pianist to sing this for you. As homework for the weekend, each student is going to practice their scale 10 times on the air-piano (or a real one if you have it). Our piano lessons will not be challenging for students who are already taking piano lessons, but we will enjoy listening to some solos now and then.