Monday, November 20th

Notices:

- There will be NO weekly homework posted this week or next week. Instead, students will be receiving a small research project to complete at home to finish up our unit on animals in science. They will receive the assignment either tomorrow or Wednesday. 

- Don't forget that this Friday is a P.D. Day! Pizza day will happen on Thursday instead this week.

     I hope that everybody had a wonderful, snowy weekend! Students were very excited to have some fresh snow to play with at recess times today. We embraced the love of the first snowfall today by doing our first "winter" themed art. First, we read the story "Snowmen at Night." We discussed all of the different uses of colour in the book and how the illustrator used different colours in the pictures. Then, students had a chance to draw out a new scene of what they think snowmen do at night! They used black paper for the background, and worked with chalk to create their pictures. I absolutely loved how students talked about different techniques for creating different colours, textures, and forms in their work. They did a great job! Here is a snapshot of some of their work:

 Mrs. Miller 

    

Thursday and Friday

Hello!

   We are always busy working and having fun in our class! Here are some of the things we did over the past two days :)

  Yesterday we had a chance to go down to the gym and cheer on our boys volleyball team! We were excited to see some of our Grade 6 lunch helpers playing for our team. Go St. Francis Go!

  During gym time yesterday we did a rotation of three activities to get our bodies moving on a dreary rainy day. Students rotated between a catching and throwing game, using skip-its, and then the scooters. The scooters really gave students a great workout!

   Today we began our day with our favourite end of the week activity: Math centers! Second block we caught up on all of our unfinished work from the week, and then had some Daily 5 activity time. 3rd block today we relaxed and watched some very funny, and very educational episode of Bill Nye the Science guy on the topics of: Amphibians, Insects, and Invertebrates. It was a great way to end the week and to compliment our unit on Animals!

   I hope that everybody has a fantastic weekend!

     Mrs. Miller 

Wednesday, Nov 15th

Reminders:
- Friday is PJ and Teddy Bear day for United Way!


    Today was an interesting day, where students were surprised with a chance to watch a movie with all the other grade 1, 2, and 3 students! As your child is sure to tell you, we were short three teachers today with no supplies available to cover. In order to make sure that all students were supervised, the primary division had a chance to relax and unwind in the learning commons in the morning and watch a movie; they were even treated to an extra long morning recess! What a beautiful sunny day to enjoy this weather and get some extra exercise!

   Students came back to class in the afternoon refreshed and ready to learn. We had one of the best Daily 5 times this year, with students working hard on each station. I was able to work one-on-one as well as with some small groups of students during this time, and everybody was eager to work.

   After Daily 5 we completed some science work. We are finishing up our unit on Animals and students are completing their own mini booklets about the 6 different classifications of animals. It is easy to see all the learning they have done these past couple of months!

   We ended with math today, where we reviewed pictographs and had a chance to visit different stations and practice drawing pictographs in a hands-on way. There were 10 stations with a brown paper bag at each station containing a variety of "mystery" objects. Students worked in pairs, dumped out the contents of each bag, and created their own pictograph to represent the data found in the bag. Students loved doing this!!

Looking forward to seeing what tomorrow brings!

     Mrs. Miller 

Monday, November 13th

Important Announcements

- Homework for this week has been posted online!

- This FRIDAY, NOV 17th our school will be having a "Teddy Bear and PJ Day" to raise funds for United way! Donations of $2 is appreciated.

- The weather is VERY chilly these days, please make sure your child is coming with lots of warm layers, especially Mitts and Hats, for recess. Thank you!

Our Work Today

    This morning we started off our Monday Math block with a few games that reinforced counting, subitizing, and number sense skills. We started with a dice game where students rolled three dice and found the sums of all three. We then discussed certain number combinations that were easier to add together (i.e. 9 + 1 + 5) and why these numbers were easier! Many students were already looking for friendly numbers, such as adding to make 10 or 5, and some were even using doubles and near doubles facts. Students were then challenged on our next activity to find as many number combinations as they could that add up to 10. A lot of great math talk happened during these activities!

   During Language Arts today we started with our Daily 5 time. After Daily 5, we workout on our weekly "Weekend Retell" writing, which we do every Monday. I also choose a different writing skill to focus on each time we do our retell stories. Today, we worked on adding more detail to our writing by answering the "5 W's" (Who, What, When, Where, Why). Students did a great job!

   And finally, during 3rd block, we continued our talk from Remembrance day about "Peace" and discussed ways we could all be Peacemakers at our school. Students then helped me create our next Religion bulletin board above our prayer table by colouring a peace sign and writing out how they could be a Peacemaker... pictures to come once everyone is finished!

  What a busy day! Looking forward to our adventures tomorrow.

   Mrs. Miller 

Tuesday, Nov 7th

Today was a very exciting day for students! You may or may not have heard the news that students finally figured out last Friday... Mrs. Miller is expecting a baby! Today students had even more fun as they were told the gender of Mrs. Miller's new baby :) Of course, I made students work for their answer!

    We started by working as a class to build a graph of their predictions. Most students predicted the baby would be a girl...

 After we made our predictions, students were shown a basket of blue dinosaur counters (boy) and a basket of red dinosaur counters (girl). Whichever basket had MORE counters in it would tell them what the baby was going to be.

   Students took turns sharing and showing the strategies that they would use to count such a large amount (there were 50):

By 5's

By 2's

By 10's 

By 3's

By 25's

  We counted the blue dinosaurs many MANY times and then discussed which strategies were the easiest/most efficient way to count. Most students agreed that counting by 5's or 10's was the most efficient way. After counting the blue dinosaurs, we used counting by 5's to count the red ones and they celebrated pretty hard after learning that Mrs. Miller's baby is a.......

GIRL :)

Mrs. Miller 

Halloween Day

Following a VERY busy week, I will be posting some reviews of what we have been doing in class lately, starting with... Halloween Day!

   Halloween Day was an extremely busy, fun, and (still) educational day! Here are the activities that we did throughout the day as students waited to go home and go trick-or-treating:

 1) "Boo Bump"
          Students started off the day with a fun Math game! The goal was to roll three dice, add them together, and pick a number. If there were no numbers left that they rolled they could "bump" their opponent off the number and take it for themselves. The goal was to place all 10 of their markers on the board first. A lot of counting and strategy was involved!

2) Roll a Monster
        Our next activity involved more dice rolling to create a unique monster! Students had lots of fun seeing how many heads, eyes, limbs, and more their monster would need to have and then they were able to use their imaginations to draw their monster. A lot of creativity was shown!

3) Halloween Safety

        Next, we watched a video and a song about how to have a safe time on Halloween. We had a quick discussion following them, and then completed the cut and paste activity below.

4) Halloween dot art

      Our last Halloween activity of the day was painting! We cut out either bat or ghost "stencils" and then used Q-Tips to dot paint around the stencils onto another paper. When we lifted the stencils off, students were left with the outline of their stencil on their page. The paintings turned out great!

   Mrs. Miller