I hope everyone had a restful Thanksgiving weekend. The students are settling into routines and are working hard on daily learning skills such as responsibility and collaboration. We are focusing on independent work stamina when completing writing activities and reading books.
Wednesday is picture day! Wear your smile.
This week in our planners I have put a sticker on the first page with our username and password for the Google Classroom. The username is 9 digits @gotvdsb.ca (with no spaces between the numbers). Please feel free to look at any assignment, however please do NOT complete these at home unless asked as homework in the planner. On the sticker, I have also given our class code for both math programs Knowledgehook and SplashLearn. Students are welcome at any time to finish up assigned activities at home in these 2 programs. Just to note: we have only used the Chromebooks at school a few times for any of these programs, we are still learning some of the basics.
Our classroom is almost out of the boxes of Kleenex I brought in in September. Please consider donating a box or two of new/unopened Kleenex/tissues for us to use as the cold and flu season quickly appoaches. (You would be suprised how many we go through!). Thank you so much in advance, we really appreciate it!
This week in Literacy:
Many students are continuing to work on legible printing. I remind students that english letters start at the top, some letters hang below the line (g, j, p, q, y) and when the letter looks that same in upper and lowercase that we need to be careful of the size we are printing. For example, there should only be an uppercase at the beginning of the following sentence: I Went tO the ZOO and SaW CatS.
We have been focused on common nouns, proper nouns (using an uppercase letter), and plural nouns (and their many spelling rules). This week we are adding in adjectives to make our nouns/sentences more interesting. We have begun a fall poem to learn about going back over our writing to add interesting details. At home: writing simple stories or letters to friends is a great way to practice printing as well as conventions of writing such as uppercase letters and punctuation.
Math:
Everyweek through our Daily Math Review sheet and small daily lessons, I will continue to review and add on topics we have already learned. With consistent review, we are helping to build confidence and soldifiy the early math skills.
We have begun a unit on patterning. Students will identify patterns as repeating, increasing or decreasing. They will create, and extend patterns by their attributes (colour, size, direction etc) as well as by operation (addition, subtraction). We will determine pattern rules and use them to extend patterns, make and justify predictions, and identify missing elements in patterns that have repeating elements, movements, or operations. To help at home, practice skip counting by 2s, 10's and 100's from any number orally. For example, "Start at 47 and count by 10's" 47, 57, 67,... "Start at 130 and count by 100's" 130, 230, 330, 430.... Then on paper count by the previous numbers, as well as 3s, 4s, and 5s from any number either forward or back. For example, start at 33 and decrease by 5 each time. 33, 28, 23, 18, 13... (In class, students each have a 200's chart in their desk to help them)