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.
