Week 13

 

Thank you to all families for joining me at Parent Teacher Conferences.  I hope that you found it a helpful look into the classroom and your child's learning.

I Can Think About How I Am Connected to My World / I Can Explore the Cultural Characteristics of My Community

This week we were lucky enough to take advantage of the beautiful weather and go on a community walk.  Since we are eagerly awaiting the installation of our community art, we set off looking art already installed in the community.  Our first stop was at the community garden where we saw the revamped Robot.  This was a special connection for us since the artist who restored the robot was none other than Artist Monica who led us through the fence art project.  It will be interesting to see how the bright colours from the robot are reflected in our own pieces.

We continued on our way to the Rainbow Fish and learned about perspective in art and how one looks at a piece is never the same with each viewing.  The capstone of our walk was to talk about how public spaces influence the feelings of belonging within a community and how enhancements like public art connect all community members together.

Literacy

All students are continuing to build skills around decoding words as they become more comfortable with reading.  As part of this process, we also spend some time using our skills to encode words (write/spell them).  Decoding and encoding are skills that go hand in hand and should be practiced simultaneously.  Most grade one students will develop these skills at the same pace.  Students in grade two who are already reading will find that their decoding skills will advance much faster than their abilities to encode and thus inventive spelling is quite common and nothing to worry about.  As students develop their understanding of the different patterns that make up words and spend much time practicing both reading and writing them, their spelling skills will improve.

This week's Red Words:  so, to, we, all

Reminders

Monday, November 28th - Learning Commons and book exchange

Week 12

This past week we have recognized Métis Week by watching some videos, listening to stories, and looking for the math in a Métis sash.

I Can Create a Concrete and Pictorial Representation of a Repeating Pattern / I Can Translate a Pattern from One Form to Another

We began our look at the Métis sash by watching a video that explained who used it, how it was used, how it was made, and how it has evolved to be an important part of Métis culture.  You can watch the video here.

Afterwards, we talked about the colours and shapes that we noticed in the sash.  We explored some of the meanings behind the colours and then practiced translating and creating a pattern onto paper.  Later in the week, we continued thinking about and exploring the patterns in Métis sashes by creating a model out of snap cubes.

Week 11

 

This week we were lucky to start off with painting our contributions to the fence art project with Artist Monica.   This was an amazing chance for students to make a contribution to Ramsay community. 

Our process started a couple of weeks ago with planning out what we might paint onto our piece.

Then we had a chance to meet Artist Monica in a virtual meeting and ask her questions.  We wanted to know things like, "How do you become an artist as part of your job?", "How long did it take you to get everything ready for us?", and "Who are the volunteers that helped you get everything ready?".

And finally, on Monday we were able to paint our pieces.  It was a lot of fun!

Week 10

Just a reminders that the grade 4/5/6 students are holding a food drive for the Veteran's Food Bank: Hello Ramsay Families: In honor of Remembrance Day, we will be collecting items for the Veteran’s Food Bank. If you are able to contribute, please begin sending items to school on Monday, October 25th. We will continue to collect donations until Wednesday, November 10th.  Here is a list of their most desired contributions: Collection list: (new items only please)  Gluten free non-perishable food Canned corn, mushrooms, beef, chilli or stew Canned ham or luncheon meat Juice Flour Unscented fabric softener and laundry detergent Unscented lotion Dishwasher pods Bandages Thank you in advance for supporting this worthy cause.

Fence Art Painting - Please remember to wear paint appropriate clothing on Monday for our fence art painting project.

I Can Find Out and Think About How I Am Connected to My World / I Can Understand People Are Different / I Can Identify Similarities or Differences Between Cultural Traditions and Communities

On Thursday students had a chance to learn about Diwali by reading (aloud, together) non-fiction texts about the holiday.  Diwali is celebrated by more than a billion people world wide.  Learning about the history, context, and traditions of this five day celebration allowed students to develop an understanding of the features of non-fiction books (table of contents, index, glossary, headings, and captions).  

After reading about the holiday we watched a video showing the creation of Rangoli art and used our loose parts to build our own Rangoli.  This opened up some rich discussions about symmetry, counting, resources management, and negotiations (sharing and working together to share needed loose parts).  We were also able to do some great reflecting on the temporary nature of Rangoli art and how sometimes we only get to enjoy our work for a short while before it's gone.

For art in the afternoon, students learned a technique for blending colors when coloring with pencil crayon.  They practiced their blending skills by coloring in a pre-drawn Rangoli.

Literacy:

This week we added the letters y, x, and q.  We also added the red words 'the', 'be', and 'are'.  

We've also been working hard at strengthening our decoding skills.  It's important to remember that emergent readers are using a lot of mental effort to read words and sometimes they look for easy fixes to help them out.  One of the things that children will often do is to look at the pictures and use it as a clue to guess an unknown word.  This is actually a very harmful habit to develop and is most noticeable as readers start transitioning away from picture books to novels.  Without picture clues in novels, students are forced back into the very difficult task of sounding out words - putting their reading comprehension and fluency development on the back burner.  

You can help your beginning reader by encouraging them to look at all the letters and sounding out words.  If they are really struggling, provide them the word and point out the sounds you used to decode it.  If you notice they are relying on guessing based on the picture, you might also consider covering up the picture to bring their focus back to the words.  

Week 9

 

Not only has another week come to an end but so has the end of another month!  We finished off the week with a variety of "Halloween themed" activities and I hope everyone had a great night of trick-or-treating!

Here's a message from our Division 2 students as they prepare to lead us through Remembrance Day:

Hello Ramsay Families:

In honour of Remembrance Day, we will be collecting items for the Veteran’s Food Bank. If you are able to contribute, please begin sending items to school on Monday, October 25^th. We will continue to collect donations until Wednesday, November 10^th. 

 

Here is a list of their most desired contributions:

Collection list: (new items only please) 

• Gluten free non-perishable food
• Canned corn, mushrooms, beef, chilli or stew
• Canned ham or luncheon meat
• Juice
• Flour
• Unscented fabric softener and laundry detergent
• Unscented lotion
• Dishwasher pods
• Bandages

 

Thank you in advance for supporting this worthy cause. 

Literacy:

This week we added the letter "V" and the red word, "and".   

In grade 1, we have also started working on started working on decoding (reading) short stories with words we can sound out based on the letters we know.  Once we have read the sentence we have been practicing reading them and drawing pictures to go along with it.  

In grade 2, we have added the the "bl" blend to our phonics knowledge.

Math:

We spent the week working on representing numbers and graphing data.

I Can Use Letters Around Me to Write New Words / I Can Use My Own Ideas to Create My Writing / I Can Use Different Tools and Mediums to Create Art

This week we read the story, "Go Away, Big Green Monster!".  After we read the story we created an anchor chart with different adjectives and body parts that could be used to describe monsters.  

Our next step was to create our own monsters.  We went to the art room and students were given the choice of a variety of materials to create their own monsters.  Afterwards, we worked on writing about our monsters in our journals.