Treat Day Tuesday

Today we read If You're Not From the Prairie by David Bouchard - ask me about the words I think of and how I feel when I hear the word, PRAIRIE. We looked on a map and saw the 3 prairie provinces - ask me if I can remember which provinces are the prairie provinces.

In Math, we started our "Pattern Palooza Party" each row has to show a different kind of pattern - these will turn into placements that we will laminate for our desks for Fun Lunch days!

After the Traverse Wall in gym and Mathletics for grade ones and Diorama details for grade twos -
A special treat at the end of the day - Mrs. Polski came in and read us a part of a book called Giraffe and Bird by Rebecca Bender. The TD bank group and the Canadian Children's Book Centre partner to present every Grade One student across Canada with this book! Because Dr. Coffin is a multi-grade school, both grade one and twos receive this book! Thank you! 

SPIRIT DAY WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28th is "Mr. P" day...dress in plaid/red/black/casual and carry our "coffee mugs" (or water bottles) around with us all day:) Feel free to add a big beard if you like!

THURSDAY is Library day. 

FRESH AIR FRIDAY - dress for the weather - it keeps changing!

LOOKING AHEAD - in 2 weeks, it's treat day again and we are responsible for the Treats - for Tuesday, December 11th. Small, nut free, bite size snacks are best - so they are easy to eat at recess time. Pencils and stickers are other ideas. Our room parent, Jared's mom, Candace will send out an email to remind and organize this. Thanks so much! 

Thursday, December 13th Save the Date - Festive Evening 6-8 pm - a time for celebration for the whole school and families.

Just another manic monday...

Today after journals and writing about our weekends - we did a SPELL CHECK. This is so we can see which words we know well and which words we need to practice. Mrs. Armour gave us 16 today. Tomorrow we will write another 20 for the grade twos (grade ones can choose to challenge themselves or to practice with word wall and white boards). We will bring these home at the end of the week to share.

Today we talked about GROWING PATTERNS. Ask me how it is different than a regular pattern. We did one huge one as a class and then we wrote some in our math books and then we could create our own - check out our pictures!

After lunch some of us shared facts about our arthropod - we are practicing sharing this week so we can check to see if there are any "gaps" in our learning before we share with our Big Buddies. Ask me about my Habitat, Diet, Survival and Interesting Facts. Ask me about my life cycle and if I know how long my bug lives?

For gym we get to be on the TRAVERSE wall - Ask me some of the rules. Please make sure I have running shoes at school for the gym. Some of us had to watch today, because we need running shoes for the Traverse Wall. It is so fun to learn how to climb up a wall like Spider Man!

There is a "flu bug" going around, so please remind us to wash our hands well, drink lots of water, eat healthy and get a good night's sleep so we can all "fight the flu"

TOMORROW IS TREAT DAY - thanks for letting me bring a quarter to support Room 2!

WEDNESDAY IS SPIRIT DAY - it's "Mr. P" day(shhhhh) We are going to wear plaid shirts or something casual, carry our water bottles around and maybe make some beards. This is an optional fun activity.

THURSDAY is Library Day.

CBC recording day - Thursday/Conferences Friday

Enjoy seeing some pictures of our recording session on Thursday! We were so excited to be actually recording for real! Mr. O'Reilly had two professionals helping him with recording and videoing - we will let you know when Mr. O'Reilly puts up a link on YouTube!
Thanks to all who came for face to face conferences - it was great to show off our dioramas, patterns and writing samples.

Thanks for reading and returning Home reading books every day Monday-Thursday.
Library Day - Thursday - sorry, we missed it this week because of CBC recording day.

Although we are continuing to work on patterning and moving into growing patterns, some parents were asking about ideas for numbers at home...here are a couple to try.

Addition Fact Activities
Race to 100 (dice and 100 chart)
With 1-3 pairs of dice depending on what level of challenge you want, you take turns shaking the dice and moving your "piece", adding each time to get to 100. You can make it more interesting by saying "doubles" or a certain number means you either subtract or skip a turn or move to the next "ten" etc.

Snap It: This is an activity that children can work on in groups or partners. Each child makes a train of connecting cubes (or lego) of a specified number. On the signal “Snap,” children break their trains into two parts and hold one hand behind their back. Children take turns going around the circle showing their remaining cubes. The other children work out the full number combination. For example, if I have 8 cubes in my number train I could snap it and put 3 behind my back. I would show my group the remaining 5 cubes and they should be able to say that three are missing and that 5 and 3 make 8.

How Many Are Hiding? In this activity each child has the same number of cubes and a cup. They take turns hiding some of their cubes in the cup and showing the leftovers. Other children work out the answer to the question “How many are hiding,” and say the full number combination.

Example: I have 10 cubes and I decide to hide 4 in my cup. My group can see that I only have 6 cubes. Stu- dents should be able to say that I’m hiding 4 cubes and that 6 and 4 make 10.
Looking Ahead:

Thursday, December 6th is Spirit Day - wear your PJ's!

Tuesday, December 11th is our TREAT DAY, which means our class supplies the snacks for this day. Thanks for thinking how you can contribute small bags of popcorn, nut free cookies or squares, oranges, candy canes, pencils...that the other students can purchase for a quarter for this fun traditional. All monies raised will be used by our classroom. 

This week...CBC music contest

This week we will be practising for our CBC music contest with Mr O'Reilly. Our recording day is Thursday and we are getting very excited. Ask me how our practices are going - what we did well and what we need to work on. Check out this link to learn more...

https://www.cbcmusic.ca/posts/18767/what-is-the-canadian-music-class-challenge


Mrs Armour is away Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Mrs Allan is teaching us. We will be continuing to work on our Math pattern posters and our Bug dioramas adding details to our habitat, thinking of how we can represent the predators and prey before creating our arthropod and it's life cycle with plasticine.

We are practising printing our Word Wall Words during writing time because these are the words we will most often use when writing our stories. This helps us practice our letters and spacing at the same time. Ask me which letters are easy for me and which letters are sometimes tricky.

On Friday, we discussed how "Landscapes" tell stories and studied some of the group of 7 paintings. We just typed in "Group of 7" - on google images and brainstormed some words we thought of when we observed the paintings...windy/light/dark/blue/black/red/cold...try it again at home! Ansel Adams is another artist with interesting landscape stories.
Mrs Armour also read the book, The Artist and Me, which is a story about Vincent Van Gogh from a boy's perspective who thought he was a bit crazy.

Before we went outside to take 2 pictures each, we discussed how we sometimes focus on things close up and sometimes on things far away and how landscapes are wider and bigger and we need to look up and around. Here are some of the stories we found with our pictures. We printed them and used them to sketch practice pictures in black and white.

A reminder of face to face conferences on Thursday 4-8 pm and Friday 8-12 pm. Please email Mrs Armour if these times do not work so you can schedule another time the following week. We are excited to show you some of our learning! Thank you!

What stories do you think these landscapes are telling?

Fun Lunch Thursday

We hope you check out the pictures of our patterns and badminton from yesterday!

Today was a fun day. It was Georgia's birthday - yay, yay, yay. She brought a special book called Georgia that was about a real lady who was an artist and brought cupcakes and fruit snacks - thanks Georgia!

This morning for Guided reading we put on 2 shows...ask me if I was in them and what part I played or was an audience member.

We looked at patterns in nature on the smart board and tried to describe the patterns we saw in more than one way....if you have time you can google "Patterns in nature - images" and try it at home! Then we worked on our Pattern posters.

We had library. It was fun. But Colin forgot to check out his books until we were heading for gym! Oops.

We played badminton - we are getting good at our hand-eye coordination and hitting those shuttlecocks over the net!

Grade 2's turn to work on Mathletics on the computer and ipads and grade ones worked on their Dioramas - habitat - ask me what I did.

Tomorrow is Fresh Air Friday! DRESS WARM!

Our Learning in Pictures! Patterns and Badminton

Tuesday

After Guided reading and poetry centres, the grade twos finished typing the "story of my name" We will all glue our stories onto coloured paper tomorrow and you will be able to read these under our portraits at Parent Conferences on Thursday, November 22nd and Friday November 23rd. You can sign up starting this Saturday. 
If we were done, we practiced spelling the most used words from the Word Wall - we used white boards and markers and could do this with a buddy.

Grade ones printed the letter "J" and "j" today. 


Thanks to Green group who is helping with Blog this week - Georgia, Kipling, Anya, Colin and Abel. They are the busy group who helps with doorbell, key card, calendar, home reading and lunch bins and door holders!


Today in Math we did more patterns and we could have the choice of using lego, cubes, or letter tiles.
We tried to trick our partners by making something wrong in our pattern and seeing if our friend could spot it. Ask me what some of my patterns were!

After lunch we met all together in Room 2 (now Ms. Yoon's room) to discuss our next steps for our bug project. We will be creating a diorama for our arthropod first using paper to show our habitat. We are hoping to have a "Arthropod Fair" to display so all of the school and parents can come and hear what we've learned as Entomologists and experts on our bug. We will let you know when we have a date for this!

We had a fire drill today! It was chilly and a bit slippery, but Mrs. Polski reminded us we have to practice in all different kinds of weather. 

Today we had gym outside. It was like tennis but we used "wiffle balls" or balls with holes in them. It was tricky, but we are doing well! 

THURSDAY is FUN LUNCH and LIBRARY (and...Georgia's birthday:)

Coming up next month - DECEMBER 11TH is our TREAT DAY. So we need lots of volunteers to be thinking of some treats (nut free please) to sell at recess. The Clubhouse gets to keep the money we raise - so we will brainstorm what we would like. Thanks for planning for this next month!