We were all very happy to see our friends after the extra long weekend and were eager to dive into our work. Here is what we got up to this week:
In Language Arts, we have been working on assessing our writing so that we can see what our next steps will be. Students enjoyed journaling about their weekend and practiced responding to a storytelling video that I made. They will be able to demonstrate what they know during the Celebration of Learning. This is now posted on the google classroom. We hope that everyone will have time to participate in this activity some time in the coming week.
In Science we are looking closely at the signs of winter. We have had lots to notice these past few weeks. Students are working in their visual journals to record what they know in pictures and in words. We are also reviewing what animals do in winter in preparation for sharing our work at next week's on-line assembly. Your child has chosen an animal to share and has 2-4 sentences to learn. Please help your child practice this over the weekend as I will be filming them next week. I will create a movie for the assembly and will post it on the blog next week.
In our Math, we have been working on strategies for adding numbers. This week we have been working on using a number line or a number path to "count on". Students look at equation and decide which is the higher number. They then start at that number and "count up" with the other number to get to a solution. In grade one, students are expected to be able to add numbers for values from 0 to 20. Of course, I am also extending this work for students who have already mastered working with these values. They are working with the numbers from 0 to 100 with the same strategy.
Of course our big Math event this week was today, our 100th Day of School! We took 22 minutes with 22 students to see how many paper chain (10 links long) that we could make. We then counted by 10 to see how many we made all together. We had 4 chains of 100 and 65 more. We discovered that we could count to 465! We had a great time counting everyone's collections that they brought in. I will quarantine these items over the weekend and return them on Monday. We also did an amazing art project. We drew ourselves as we are today and we drew ourselves how we thought we would look at age 100. The kids had a great time looking at images of seniors and trying to envision what they would look like when they got to be 100.
We finished up our Valentine's art from last week, but we are not leaving this work behind. I have noticed, as I am sure that all of you have, that some of our students are having some issues with friends. I have been spending an increasing amount of time dealing with students who say "He is being mean" or "My friend isn't playing with me" or "She is not being fair'. Social issues seam to be coming up in many classes with a variety of kids, so I know that my students are not alone in needing help to develop socially. I believe that that a part of this is the limitations that we have put in place due to Covid and how we have had to make changes in how we normally interact with each other. I will be focusing on social interactions more intentionally in the coming weeks and will post the area of focus on the blog so that you can discus them with your child at home.
This week we talked about how to make sure that others are included in the games that we play. We did some role playing about how to ask someone to play with us and how to find friends who want to play the game we like. We also talked about how to tell someone that you don't like this game and could we play something else. We can either choose who we play with or what game we want to play, but we can't do both. Our friends have the right to choose a different game if they want. We also worked on the ideas that just because our friend doesn't want to play with us right now, it doesn't mean that he or she is not our friend.
The building of friendship skills goes hand in hand with empathy. I plan to do a number of activities around these concepts in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
