With Friday the 13th and a full moon, people were predicting we would have a crazy week, and what a week it has been for the world. Luckily, things have been running much more smoothly in our classroom! Besides talking about hand washing and staying healthy, we have also managed to squeeze in lots of other fun and exciting activities.
On Monday we were visited by the grade 8 art students from DGS, who brought over their completed art projects that were based on the descriptive paragraphs we wrote in January. Their hardworking was evident and the artwork they gifted our students was AMAZING. We were hoping to display the artwork for conferences, so we will hold onto it here to see if we are able to get a chance to do that after Spring Break, and then we will send them home! Our Science focus this week has been on boats. We started the week testing materials to see if they were waterproof because a boat needs to be made out of waterproof material. We discovered that paper is not waterproof and if you leave a material like that in water for too long it will sink. Metal, wax paper and plasticine faired much better. We also did a mini exploration of sailboats. First we learned about the parts of a sailboat that we can see, like the hull, mast and sail. We built sailboats using a cork for the hull, toothpicks for the mat and post-it notes for the sails. When we tried to float our boats they fell over!! This led us to realize that sailboats need something on the bottom of the boat to balance the weight and height of the sails. So, we created a keel out of another toothpick and a ball of plasticine. When we tested this version, it stayed upright! Finally this week we explored different types of boats, where we find them and what they are used for. Ask your child to explain some of the different things we use boats for. Our literacy focus on storytelling continued this week. Inspired by a story we read last week, called Africville, students wrote short stories about their favorite places or places they would want people to remember forever. Next, we learned about a special Blackfoot method of recording stories, called story robes. These were created out of buffalo hides and painted pictographs. Often they told the story of a season or important series of events in a Blackfoot community. When we looked at a few different story robes, we noticed that a lot of them tell the story in a circle, or a spiral, instead of left to right like we may be used to. We also talked about how one pictograph represents an entire event or part of the story. To end our week we took our favorite place stories and tried to think of pictographs that would represent the main parts of our stories. It was tricky thinking of how to represent something with just a simple symbol, but it went pretty well! Our Math focus this week continued to be on double digit computation, but now we are starting to mix up addition and subtraction, needing to pay attention to every equation we try to solve. This is making things a bit more difficult because it easy to mix up the adding and subtracting regrouping strategy, but it is helping students to reinforce and practice the skills they have developed so far, and learn to look closely and think carefully about what strategy fits. We also started looking at problem solving that requires us to add or subtract double digit numbers. This has been trickiest of all, because we have to figure out what the question is asking us to do (add or subtract) and then remember how to use the strategies we have been practicing. We are going to continue to focus on practicing all of these skills to make sure we feel comfortable with using different strategies when we need them. This is a great thing to practice at home, especially over Spring Break, to make sure it stays stuck in our brains! Have a good weekend everyone, Ms.Brett
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Our first week of March brought us snow, sun and almost everything in between. As we enter in our Calgary spring please make sure your child is coming to school with all the right outside gear.
To start off our week I gave students a challenge: turn a ball of plasticine from being a sinker to a floater. It was awesome watching them test out different things and figure out that when you change the shape of a material it will start to float. The most successful designs looked like small bowls and were able to hold the weight of a few pennies. Next week we will be exploring what materials make good boats. This week we looked more closely at an important part of the Maritimes, fishing! There are a lot of sea creatures that live in the Maritimes, but we focused on lobsters, something Atlantic Canada is famous for. We learned about where and how they are caught, and about the life of a fisherman. For fun, we created mini lobster traps with plasticine lobsters in them. Next week we will be looking at the boats that fishermen use and how they are built. Our exploration of storytelling continued this week. We started off the week reading "A Book With No Pictures". The story it tells is pretty silly, but the fact that the book has no pictures makes it unique. While we were reading we tried to imagine in our mind what pictures would go with the story and after reading we created a picture based on what we imagined. After, we talked about how this story was similar to the Blackfoot stories Mr. Scout shared with us last week. Like those stories, there were no pictures and we had to use our imagination to create the pictures. Then, we brainstormed how Blackfoot people may have recorded their stories if there were no books or paper or pencils. Mr. Scout visited us again later in the week to share with us the concept of pictographs, which were used by my many Blackfoot people to record their stories on rocks. He showed students how simple drawings of people, weather, land and animals were used to make a story and then asked the students to use the symbols to retell the story of Napi and the Rock, which he shared the week before. Next week we are going to continue exploring storytelling and pictographs, looking at how we can create our own stories with them. It was a full week, and there are only a couple more weeks until Spring Break! Make sure you take a look at the weekly email for fields trip announcements. Have a great weekend, Ms.Brett February may be coming to an end, but we are just getting started with new Language Arts, Science and Social Studies units.
This week we began a unit on storytelling. We explored what a story is and how stories have changed over time. Most students thought of books and stories that we read, and everyone agreed that stories were something we enjoy. Thanks to some help from Mr. Scout, we are beginning to learn about Indigenous storytelling, which often don't involve books or reading words at all. Over the next few weeks we will explore different forms of storytelling and use them to tell our own stories. We are also diving into learning about a new community in Canada, the Maritimes. While we will mainly learn about Nova Scotia, we know that New Brunswick and PEI are also Maritime provinces. This week we learned about a landmark that is commonly seen in these provinces, lighthouses. We read a story about a lighthouse keeper and learned how they help keep people and boats safe while at sea. Using mixed media, we created our own lighthouse landscapes. To begin our unit on boats and buoyancy we explored how different materials act when you put them in water. Not surprisingly, some float and some sink. Students tested and sorted materials as sinkers or floaters, and then tried to figure out why different items behave differently in water. There were some good hypotheses relating to the size of the item and the weight of the item. Then we tested an apple, which is fairly heavy and big. Ask your child what happened when we put an apple in water, and why it was surprising! This led us to learn about the concept of density, or in grade 2 terms: how close together the particles inside an item are. It was a bit mind-blowing that all things are made up of tiny particles, even us, but students were able to understand how density and buoyancy are connected. Ask your child to see if they can remember the rule about density when it comes to floating and sinking. In Math we have wrapped up our focused practice on double digit addition. At this point, we have learned how to add using three different strategies, and how to regroup when our ones equal 10 or more. Next week we will start to look at subtraction again, and see how the regrouping rule works when we are subtracting. Students have been doing and AWESOME job with this, and they are starting to see the importance of mental math, so we have also been practicing some common mental math facts, like doubles. Next week we will already be into March, and Spring Break will be in sight, I can't believe how fast time is flying by. Parent teacher interviews are just before Spring Break, and they are out last formal time to meet before the end of the year to talk about your child's progress. Keep your eye on emails from the school about booking, I am looking forward to seeing all of you! Have a great weekend, Ms.Brett We are officially past 100 days of school!! On Wednesday we celebrated 100 days together. To mark this special day we had a BFG (big friendly group) gym class with ALL the grade 2 students. Together we did different challenges involving 100 movements. We also did a math scavenger hunt around the school, looking for clues and solving riddles. To end our day we imagined what we would look like when we are 100 and then imagined what Calgary will look like when we are 100. Building off of our 100s day, we also did some writing this week around what has changed in the last 100 years. We watched some cool videos about how cars and cities have changed, and students did a great job of brainstorming all the things that are different now. With all this past and future talk, I couldn't help but share some clips of two tv shows from my childhood, The Flintstones and The Jetsons, one representing the past, and one the future.
This week we travelled to a new community in Canada. We left the chilly Arctic and headed south, landing in Halifax, Nova Scotia. For the next couple of months we will be learning about the Maritime landscape, culture and way of life. While we are there we will also be learning about the Acadian people and what makes their culture unique. Since water and boats are an important part of life in the Maritimes, we will also be starting our Science unit on boats and buoyancy at the same time. These two units will come together nicely as we explore a new part of Canada. Our Math focus this week was on double digit addition WITH regrouping (or, as many of you know it, carrying). Students are practicing what to do when the 'ones' column adds up to ten or more. Here are the steps we practiced this week: 1) stack the addends 2) add the ones 3) 10 or more? Share next door (put the 1 in the tens column, leave the rest) 4) add together ALL of the tens (even the one on top) A very helpful skill when doing addition (and subtraction) in the double digits, especially with regrouping, is mental math. These are the quick facts up to 20 that we have memorized. The quicker students can recall these basic facts, the quicker, and more accurately, they can compete larger computations. Playing card games or board games at home is a great way to strengthen these skills. Have a great weekend! Ms.Brett Our super short week was full of excitement! We enjoyed winter sports day and yummy hot chocolate on Tuesday. On Wednesday we celebrated kindness day and Valentines day.
In between all the special activities we also squeezed in an art project, poetry, new Words Their Way and math. For art we worked on a Ted Harrison inspired landscape. Students used sharpies and wax crayons to create a bright and colorful arctic landscape. There was lots of careful coloring involved, but all the effort was worth it because they turned out great! We also learned about a new, Japanese poem called a haiku. They are tricky to write because they use a special syllable rule. Ask your child if they remember how many syllables go in each line! This week we have been practicing adding and subtracting two-digit numbers, with both + and - mixed together on one page. We have also been doing some problem solving that allows us to apply this knowledge to a real life context. Next week we will begin learning how to regroup when we are adding (carrying the 1, as many of you may know it). Have a great long weekend! Ms.Brett Happy Friday everyone! It was great to see so many families last night for math night.
This week we finished up our unit on hot and cold temperatures, and you should have received information about a take-home project. If there are any questions, let me know! We are also nearing the end of our time in the Arctic, and we will traveling to a new part of Canada soon. This week we looked more closely at the people who live in the Arctic. We learned about what clothes they wear, what their homes are like, what food they eat and how they travel. We also explored some of the sports, art and music that are unique to Arctic communities. One group of Indigenous people who have lived in the Arctic for thousands of years are the Inuit people, and we looked at how their culture has changed over time, and also at the traditions they have continued to maintain. These include building inukshuks and igloos, fishing and hunting, throat singing, and the Inuktitut language. We watched some videos of the Arctic Winter Games, which celebrates traditional sports, like the two foot high kick and the stick pull. Last week we learned about the Inuit print maker Kenojuak Ashevak. This week we also spent some time learning about Ted Harrison, a very well known artist. Although he is not Inuit, he often painted Northern Canadian landscapes and was inspired by life in the Arctic. We looked closely at his style of painting, noticing the bright colors he paints with, and how we creates a picture by making sections of color. To help us understand his color choices, we also learned about the color wheel this week. We noticed how some colors look good together, and we also talked about warm colors and cold colors. Next week we will be using all of this information to help us create one final piece of Arctic art, inspired by Ted Harrison. We are starting a short writing unit on poetry. This week we focused on acrostic poems, and practiced writing our own. Students did an amazing job of solving the 'puzzle' of an acrostic poem, looking for words and phrases that started with the correct letter, and matched the topic. They wrote beautiful acrostic poems to demonstrate all of their learning about the Arctic. In the next few weeks we will be looking at a few different types of poems, and exploring how we can use a few carefully chosen descriptive words to make a big impact in our writing. Subtraction was our big focus this week in math. I thought it would be tricky for students to switch gears into a new math operation, but they did so great that we learned both two-digit subtraction strategies! First, we practiced using our hundreds chart. Here are the steps: 1) circle the big number 2) count BACKWARDS by 1s 3) count UP by 10s Then, we learned how to use the stacking strategy: 1) stack the numbers (big number on top) 2) subtract the 1s 3) subtract the 10s Students are encouraged to select the one that makes most sense for them. We will not be looking at regrouping (borrowing/ carrying) until after the long weekend. Next week we are celebrating Kindness Day on Wednesday, so this week we also spent some time reading, writing and talking about Kindness. We also started a special project with our Grade 1 buddies that we will be presenting at the next assembly (see the weekly email for more details). Have a great weekend everyone! Ms.Brett This week got started with students finishing their polar bear slideshows. This was the first time many of them used Google slides, and they did a great job of figuring out how to use the program. Speaking of polar bears, we also enjoyed having Clay for Kids in on Wednesday. Students learned about working with clay and were able to create and paint a polar bear. Thank you to our volunteers who helped make that experience possible! Our clay projects should be ready to take home by the end of the month. We have now covered almost all of the outcomes for our Science unit on hot and cold, which means we will be starting a project next week to demonstrate our learning. This project will have some steps to do at school, and some at home, so keep your eyes peeled for more information. Our learning this week continued to be around insulators and how we heat and cool different spaces. On Tuesday we tested some different insulators around the classroom, ask your child which one worked the best. On Thursday we also spent some time learning about how the school is heated, and then discussing how our homes are heated (and cooled). Our math focus this week was on our last strategy for two-digit addition (without regrouping). This strategy will look very familiar to all of you, we call it stacking because of the way the numbers sit on top of each other. Here are the steps: 1) stack the addends (they must have the 1s and 10s lined up) 2) add the ones 3) add the tens * we add the line down the middle to help us make sure our numbers are lined up properly, and this will help us stay organized once we start to regroup (borrow/carry). Next week we will begin looking at subtraction, and learning some strategies to make two-digit subtraction easier. At this point we have not looked at regrouping (or borrowing and carrying), but that we be our next step! So far everyone has done a really great job of trying each strategy and finding one that works best.
To get us geared up for subtraction we also spent some time talking about how addition and subtraction are different. Two big things we need to remember are: - the bigger number HAS to go first in subtraction - the difference (or answer) when we are subtracting should be SMALLER than the big number we started with. There is one exception: subtracting 0. These 'rules' will help us next week to make sure we are finding the correct solutions. Next week we will be wrapping up our exploration of the arctic and the Inuit. We will be looking more closely at the people who live there, what they eat, where they live, how they travel, and what they do. We are also learning about some artists that are either Inuit, or use the arctic as their subject. This week we looked are the printmaking of Kenojuak Ashevak, as well as some soapstone carving. Have a great weekend everyone! Ms.Brett Who else has been enjoying this balmy January weather? It was great to be able to get the kids back outside this week and to see some sunshine. Thank you parents for still sending your kiddos with all the right gear, as our morning recess can still be a little chilly. This week we continued to practice reading and interpreting temperature. We are comparing the temperature in Iqaluit and Calgary daily, and looking at the forecast for both places to determine the warmest and coldest days. We also began learning about insulation this week. Insulation is used to trap heat, and it can be found in many different forms. Ask your child to tell you about how animals insulate their bodies, and what kinds of insulation humans use. Our exploration of both insulation and the arctic came together this week as we started a mini research project on polar bears. Students worked together to gather information from books and short videos on polar bear habitats, diet, appearance, adaptations and other interesting facts. They also started creating a google slide presentation to share their research. Ask your child to tell you about their very special fur and how it helps them survive. Our math focus this week continued to be on double digit addition, but this week we learned and practiced a new strategy, using expanded form. This strategy, while a bit more complicated, helps students learn how numbers can be taken apart and put back together to create new numbers. There are 4 steps: 1) expand both numbers 2) add the ones together 3) add the tens together 4) add the ones and tens together Here is what it looks like: Next week we will begin learning the traditional algorithm, where the addends are stacked. From there, students will select a strategy that feels best to them. Then, we will explore subtraction. This week we also learned a strategy for solving word problems called guess and check. This strategy encourages students to try a solution, check if it works, and then adjust to get closer to the right answer. In doing this, students learn that making 'mistakes' is okay, and part of the problem solving process. They also learn that we can learn from our mistakes to find the correct solution.
Our writing focus this week, and for the next few weeks, will be on expanding our sentences to include details and description. Students are practicing taking a simple sentence like, 'It is good' or ' I like pizza', and turning it into a more complex sentence like, 'It is amazing because _____' or I like eating pizza when I ______". Our goal in grade two is for students to become more proficient at combining ideas together, explaining and describing their ideas, and ultimately making their writing more interesting for the reader. Hopefully you begin to see this change in their TWAS writing over the next few months. Have a great weekend, Ms.Brett What a week. Five blue days in a row meant no time outside and some very squirrelly kids (and teachers) by the end of the week. We survived though, and are all looking forward to some warmer temperatures next week! Perhaps a blessing in disguise, the extreme cold weather was a perfect way for us to start learning about temperature. This week we learned how to read temperatures (minus ___ degrees Celcius), what a thermometer is and how to measure temperature using one. We have also been keeping track of the temperature and weather here in Calgary, as well as Iqaluit. Fun fact, two days this week were colder here than there with wind chill! To end our week we also explored how temperature can change materials by freezing, cooking, melting or burning them. We have also continued to explore Iqaluit and the arctic. This week we learned about the northern lights, or the Aurora Borealis, which is unique to this area of the world. We learned about how they are created and the different stories that people share about them in different cultures. We also explored the different types of animals that live in the arctic, like polar bears, narwhals and caribou. To bring our learning together we created art using chalk pastels for the northern lights and cut out animal silhouettes. Next week we will be bringing Science and Social Studies together to learn more about how animals stay warm in such a cold climate. This week we spent a lot of time writing about our creatures for the grade 8 art class at DGS. We are sending out writing away today, and we will wait to see what they create! We are also back into our daily 5, words their way, and reading routines in the classroom. Hopefully everyone is back in their routines at home as well. As we work towards June, expectations increase and the push to continue to see growth in reading and writing is important. Math this week was focused on two-digit addition. This can be tricky, but everyone crushed it! This week we learned a special strategy using the hundreds chart, and in the coming weeks we will learn two more strategies for two-digit addition, with the idea being that students can find a personal strategy that works best for them. At this point we are only working with numbers that do not require regrouping (or carrying), and we are just working on addition. We will slowly build up to regrouping, and focus on developing strong building blocks for addition and subtraction before then. Here is our strategy from this week: 1) circle the first number Look at the second number and find the 1s and the 10s value 2) count across by ones 3) count down by tens Where you land is the answer! Here is what it looks like: I strongly encourage students to practice these strategies at home, using a hundreds chart printed from the internet. Remember, the order you do things matters, and is helping to train our brains to look at ones first, and then tens (which is important for the traditional stacking algorithm we will learn in a couple weeks).
Here's to warmer weather and being able to get outside next week! Have a great weekend, Ms.Brett Happy New Year!
This week we jumped back into our routines and started some new units in Social Studies and Science. On Tuesday we "flew" to Iqaluit, Nunavut. We will be exploring the arctic landscape and Inuit culture for the next couple of months. So far, we have noticed that the buildings in Iqaluit are very colorful, there are lots of shipping containers, and that right now there is a lot of snow there. We also noticed that some of the signs in Iqaluit have a different language on them. Ask your child to tell you about the airport there- it is pretty different from ours! We also learned about the flag of Nunavut and what the different colors and symbols represent. Students came up with some pretty interesting wonders about life in the North. In the coming weeks we will learn about the people who live there and what makes it a unique and special place. We are also going to be exploring the Science topic of temperature for the next couple of months. This week we compared hot and cold items and talked about how we can dress for cold weather. In the next few weeks we will explore how to measure temperature, how to change temperature and how we use heating and cooling systems in our lives. There will be a fun, at home project towards the end of the unit. This unit will overlap a lot with our study of the Arctic as we can look at how people and animals survive in a colder climate. This week we started a very exciting writing project. We created imaginary creatures and next week we are going to write about them. In our writing we are going to add as much detail and descriptive language as we can because when we are done writing we are going to send it to the grade 8 art students at Dr. George Stanley. The art students are going to read our writing and then create a drawing or a painting of our creature, using only our descriptive writing to guide them. When they are done, they are going to bring the art to us and we will see how close it is to our original creature. This is a great opportunity for students to focus on descriptive writing and adding juicy details to explain their ideas further. Our Math focus this week was on reviewing place value, as preparation for our unit of double digit addition. Students learned a new card game that helps reinforce the idea of place value. Each player flips over two cards and tries to rearrange them to make the biggest possible number. For example, if you flip a 4 and a 6, you could make 46 or 64. Who ever makes the biggest number gets to keep the cards. Next week we will be starting double digit addition and I will introducing a few different strategies to students, allowing them to figure out which strategy works best for them. Have a great weekend, stay warm! Ms.Brett |
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