Sharing our Pumpkin Fest Virtually

Mrs. Glowacki and Mrs. Gainor have created a video of our Pumpkin Fest for everyone to enjoy.

Please click here to watch the video.

Have a Safe and Happy Hallowe'en!

Our Learning This Week Oct 26-29

 This week has been an exciting week with lots of learning!  

In math, we started off with making patterned chains using halloween colours.  Student’s tried to be creative with making more complex patterns like ABCC, AABCC, etc.  Then we explored some measurement with several pumpkins in our classroom.  We ordered them from biggest to smallest, guessed which pumpkin would have the most seeds, then counted the collection of seeds for each pumpkin.  We grouped the seeds into fives and tens and recorded our learning in our math journals. 

We completed a variety of writing tasks throughout the week: writing about our weekend, a jack-o-lantern journal entry, and our halloween costumes.  The focus was to add more details and lengthen our writing.  We have also focused on printing the letters G and C. It is great to see how many connections they are making daily to our learned letters, their sounds and words they know that make those sounds.  Students are also very excited to be moving forward in their sight word list found in their show and share book.  Being able to read those words at the snap of a finger without sounding them out, will support them with progressing in their daily reading development.

Students watched an artist to learn how to draw a pumpkin (website: Art hub for Kids).  First they practiced in their drawing books, and then they sketched our actual pumpkins by drawing the shapes they saw which included the dents and scratches as they saw them.  We also made a piece of halloween art using crayon resist and mixed our own colour of orange to apply over the crayon picture.  

Thank you to everyone who participated in carving pumpkins for our pumpkin patch.  I hope that everyone has a safe and happy halloween. 

Next week, we will be working on a project for our Remembrance Day virtual assembly.  Students will be recorded holding a piece of their own art and telling what peace looks like to them.  Their name will not appear on the video, but their faces will be a part of the presentation and this will be shared families for our Remembrance Day ceremony.  This presentation is covered by the consent for use at school document you filled out at the beginning of the year.  If you have any questions or would prefer that your child not be recorded, please email me before 5 pm on November 2nd.

Reminders:

Saturday October 31 - deadline to provide the school with any service photos for Remembrance Day - please send them to me by Saturday at noon so that they can be added into the short video remembering our personal connections to our service members.  Students will view this at school during our learning about Remembrance Day.

Monday, November 2 - Home Reading Exchange

Thursday, November 5 - Home Reading Exchange

Tuesday, November 10 - Video of Remembrance Day Assembly will be available to families

Wednesday November 11 - No School

Our Learning This Week Oct 19-23

 Our cold and snowy weather this week has been a bit of a surprise, but we are nothing if not adaptable.  In addition to getting outside for regular recess breaks, we have also been taking our learning outside.  Here are some of the things we have worked on this week:

We started our week by finishing up our Kandinsky art from last week.  When we put all of our pieces together, they look amazing.  The colours make us feel calm, happy, and excited.

Our work in Health and Wellness this week centered around Zones of Regulation.  This is a system of classifying our emotions into colour groups.  Green is calm, focused, and happy.  Blue is tired, sad, or anxious.  Yellow is upset, fidgety, and impatient.  Red is very angry, upset, or out of control.  We then explored different strategies that we all can use to help us get to green when we are in one of the other zones.

In Math, we continue to investigate the numbers and how to count groups of objects, large and small.  This has included working on tallying, number writing, and a group counting collections outside.  

Students are becoming more accurate in counting objects and are keen to record their understanding in a variety of ways.

In Language Arts, we continue our work on letter sounds and printing lower case letters.  We have now reviewed more than half the alphabet and are using these letters to sound out short words and read and write them with accuracy. If you would like to see the letters we have covered to date and practice some printing and drawing with your child to reinforce these skills, please check out the google classroom.  I am also thrilled with how excited the students are about learning their list words.  These are the words that are glued into their show and share journals. They are the high frequency words that students need to be able to read by sight (without sounding out).  Knowing these words are key to helping your child progress with their reading.  Having your child practice reading them at home and look for them in their Home Reading books is a great way to support their reading development.

All of the students are excited by the number of snowshoe hares that are frequenting our school yard.  They are in the process of changing colour and we have been observing them and noticing how they use their colour to hide.  When they were brown, they blended in with the shrubs and grass.  Now they are beginning to blend in with the snow. Students also observed that they keep very still so that they are harder to see.  Observing our seasonal changes and the needs of animals to adapt to the environment is a part of our Science curriculum.

Students are excited about the upcoming holiday of Hallowe'en.  I plan to capitalize on this with a number of Math, Language Arts, Science and Art activities next week.  On Thursday, October 29th, students are encouraged to wear their costumes to school and we will be writing about the character we are pretending to be.  If your child does not plan to wear a costume, please let me know and I will arrange an alternate writing activity for him/her.

Many students have fond memories of last year's Pumpkin Fest.  Due to Covid restrictions, this year's Pumpkin Fest will be an outdoor event and it will be for students only.  We are asking families to bring their carved Pumpkin to school on Thursday Morning and drop it off in our classroom area of the Pumpkin Patch.  I will show the students the correct spot on Wednesday and we will have a sign indicating our class' area so that you will know where to display your pumpkin.  Students will have the opportunity to go out during the day to view all of the creations and then will be able to take their pumpkins home at the end of the day.

We also began our discussions with students about Remembrance Day this week.  We read the poem, "In Flanders Field" and made the poppies for our Remembrance Day wreath.  In the first week of November, students will be working to prepare something for our virtual assembly.  This will be something that the students in the entire school will view during November 10th.  We are creating a brand new presentation of family members of our community that have served in the military.  If you have a picture of a family member, past or present, who has served in the military, please send it in an email to kaglowacki@cbe.ab.ca  with the following information:  Name, relation to your student, when they served and where. (ex - Joe Smith, grandfather of Sandy Smith -Served in Canada in the 1970's).

Upcoming

Monday October 26 - Home Reading Exchange

Wednesday October 28 - Picture Retakes

Thursday October 29 - Home Reading Exchange - Pumpkin Fest and Hallowe’en Costume day

Friday October 30 - PD No school for students

October 13-16

 We have had a short but busy week.  Students are really showing what they know about reading and writing and are so excited about moving their learning forward.

In Language Arts, we have begun using a writing rubric to reflect on what we know how to do to make a good journal page and what to work on next.  Students are taking time after writing to compare their work to the rubric and assess their own work.

In reading, we have added more words to our word wall and have been practicing them regularly.  We look for these words in the books we are reading and are excited when we recognize them.  Check your child’s Show and Share book for the list of words that they need to work on.  We are also using letter patterns to help us read words that rhyme. We call these word families - __ad family (had, bad, mad, dad, etc) and __op family (top, mop, hop, stop, flop, drop, etc.)

In Science, we are focusing on how we use our senses to learn about our world.  We have been doing activities inside and outside to explore our surroundings and to develop descriptive vocabulary to communicate what we are sensing in our world.

We are continuing Math learning in two important areas.  Students are exploring a variety of simple patterns such as ABAB, AABB, ABC, and AAB.  They are using what they know about patterns to solve an open ended problem.  The other area that we are developing is our understanding of numbers and quantities.  This week we are using dominos to help us recognize dot patterns and their corresponding numbers.  We have some great games that are helping us to recognize how groups of dots go together to make a larger number.

To inspire our work in Art this week, we read the story “The Dot” by Peter H. Reynolds.  You can find the online book here.  We also looked at the famous art by Kandinsky and began creating our own unique art pieces.  We will post a picture of our finished work in next week’s blog.

Upcoming

Monday October 19 - Home Reading Exchange

Thursday October 22 - Home Reading Exchange

Thursday October 29 - Pumpkin Fest and Hallowe’en Costume day

Home Reading 2020

 

We are so excited to begin our Home Reading program for this school year.  We will be running the program differently this year in order to ensure that materials are managed safely.  Students will be able to take new books home twice per week.  Each Home Reading exchange day, students will return their previous books to a return bin to be quarantined until they are safe to be borrowed by another student.  They will then be able to choose 3 new books to work on at home until the next Home Reading exchange day.  Students will only be able to choose new books on Monday and Thursday.  Books will be laid out for students to choose and the teacher will then help them put their chosen books in their Home Reading bag.  This will ensure that only your child and their teacher will touch the books that they are bringing home.  If your child forgets their books on a reading exchange day, please keep them until the next Home Reading day as they can continue to re-read those books and gain mastery.

 

In your child’s Home Reading bag, you will find a Home Reading log book.  This book has some information for you on how to support your child in their reading.  Having students re-read their books multiple times helps them to become proficient in their reading.  Please have your child look for their high frequency words (word list) in the books that they are bringing home.  We also encourage you to ask questions and have your child re-tell their book as a way to demonstrate their understanding of what they are reading.  You can initial one box in the log book for each 10-minute period that your child spends reading. 

 

Home Reading books should be at your child’s proficient reading level.   They should not have to struggle with more than a couple of words in their chosen books.  This is a chance for your child to practice the reading that they are learning with the teacher at school and to develop their comprehension and fluency in reading.

 

Having students read texts at their level daily is important for their development as a reader, but they also need to have exposure to stories and books that are beyond their reading level.  We encourage all families to take time to share books together in support of literacy.

 

Happy Reading!

October 5- 8 Our Learning

We have been truly blessed by some amazing fall weather this week.  We have taken advantage of it by, once again, taking our learning outside.  Here are some of the things we have done:

We worked this week on building our vocabulary through learning some great words about how some animals move.  We wrote about the animals that we created with our leaf art last week and were able to decide how they would move.

Of course, our trip to Twelve Mile Coulee was a highlight.  We observed nature, did some outdoor Science by locating colours in nature to match some paint colour cards, using our senses to listen, smell, feel and see things in nature.  We were also able to spend some time with our Blackfoot Elder, Saa'Kokoto.

In Math, we created a beaded number line of 50 beads.  We used alternating colours to show the tens and washers to show the 5's.  This will be a tool we can use as we explore what numbers look like and can be represented.  

In our exploration of Thanksgiving, we really wanted to look at the many things we have to be thankful for.  We decided to represent things from Na'a (Mother Earth) that we are blessed to have and things in our lives that we are fortunate to enjoy.  

Ms. Miller has asked students to put together a small instrument package at home that students can bring to school to use during music class.  This is the link to a video to give you some ideas of what would be appropriate.  I am asking you to send the instrument kit in a small bag with handles that your child can keep on the bottom hook in the coat room when they need to use it for music.

Upcoming

Friday October 9th - PD - No School

Monday October 12 - Thanksgiving - No School

Note - If you have not yet reviewed the Tuscany School Digital Citizenship with your child and sent your signed form into the teacher, please complete this as soon as possible.

September 28-October 2

Our last week of September has been a busy one.  Here is what we have been working on:

In Language Arts, students looked at a variety of pictures to decide how improving their drawing could help them do a better job in their journal work.  They then attempted to include details in their journal pictures in order to help tell the story of their weekend.  Students are in various stages of adding print to their work.  Some are labeling and adding a few letters while others are attempting to write a complete sentence.  

We have continued to observe the changes in trees during the fall season.  We got outside to complete a See, Think, Wonder page in our visual journals.  Recorded things we saw, what it makes us think about and what I now wonder.

In Math, we continued to work on printing and representing the numbers, but we were most excited to explore sorting and measuring with our fall leaves.  We sorted our leaves by colour, size, shape, and texture.  Students then used their leaves to measure things in the classroom and record their work in their notebook.

We read the story "Leaf Man" by Lois Ehlert and were inspired to create our own leaf creatures.  They look so amazing.  We will be writing about them next week.

Orange Shirt Day was an important part of our week.  We read a couple of stories and watched a video about the event.  We used this as a way to help students build empathy for others and to recognize the importance of valuing the differences of First Nations' culture.  Thank you for having your child participate.

 Upcoming

Tuesday October 6 -Coulee Trip With Saa'kokoto 

Wednesday October 7 - Picture Day

Friday October 9 -PD Day - No School 

Monday October 12 - Thanksgiving - No School