This week we have been preparing for two important events. We have been learning about Terry Fox and getting ready for the Terry Fox run, which we did today. Despite the weather, it was great to see everyone in our school community out running together to continue the legacy of someone important. We have also been preparing for Orange Shirt Day, which is on Monday. To help us understand the reason why we recognize this day, we have been reading stories about residential school and how it made children feel when they attended them. Our whole school has gathered around two stories in particular, When We Were Alone and Shi-Shi-Etko, both written by Indigenous authors. These stories gently describe the feelings and challenges that children faced when they were taken away from their families and sent to a school far away, for a long time. These stories prompted many wonderful discussions about belonging, memories, kindness, family and school. We invite families to continue these conversations at home and we also encourage everyone to wear Orange on Monday. We wear orange to recognize the sense of belonging that was taken away from many people during residential schooling and to recognize and acknowledge that every child matters, no matter who they are or where they are from. For Math this week we continued to practice interpreting and creating graphs. As we begin to focus on new concepts in Math in the coming weeks we will continue to practice our graphing skills during our calendar time. This week we also started looking at 100s charts. We looked at patterns and have begun discussing how we can use a hundreds chart to add numbers together. To help us practice this we learned a new game: Race to 100. For this game you need 2 hundreds charts, dice or playing cards, and a marker. Each player takes turns flipping a card or rolling the dice and counting on from their last number. The first person to reach 100 wins! Our Science unit on liquids gave us an opportunity to do two different experiments this week. First, we learned about surface tension during the magic penny experiment. Students used eye droppers to drop water onto a penny. Ask you child what happened to the water when it landed on the penny. Next, we learned about density by creating a tower of liquids. We poured different liquids (honey, milk, dish soap, rubbing alcohol, oil and water) into a graduated cylinder and watched what happened. We all made a hypothesis first. Some people thought they would mix, some thought they would change color and others thought they would explode! Ask your child to tell you what actually happened. We learned that different liquids have different densities, which means the particles in the liquid are closer together (more dense) or father apart (less dense).
We have been continuing to learn about where we are in the world. This week we learned about the province we are in, Alberta. We explored different parts of Alberta on google maps and discovered that there are lots of special things in Alberta. We have the Rocky Mountains, hoodoos, dinosaur bones, prairies and farms, forests, big cities and two hockey teams. Next week we will look at Canada and finally, Earth. This week we looked at the final part of the Circle of Courage, generosity. Most people think this is just able being nice, but it is more than that. Generosity is about doing things for other people even though it might not help or make a difference to you. For example, helping someone who is hurt even though you might miss some of your recess, or giving someone a compliment when they need it. Generosity is letting someone else read your favourite book or letting your friend choose a game to play even though it might not be what you want to do. Have a great weekend, stay warm! Ms.Brett
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Even though this was a short week for us, it felt jam packed! We have now learned about two more parts of the Circle of Courage. Last week we learned about independence. We brainstormed all of the ways we can show independence at school, like taking care of our things, solving problems on our own, and following instructions. This week we learned about mastery. Mastery is a special part of the Circle of Courage because sometimes people think it is about being perfect or the best at something. It is actually about trying our best, and doing our best work. This is usually different for different people. This year we will talk a lot about challenging ourselves and trying to do OUR best work, which doesn't mean being perfect, or being the same as someone else. Mastery is also about having a growth mindset, not giving up and being willing to try new things. Here is a picture of what our circle looks like so far, only one more section to learn about! This week we continued to work on graphing, and students worked hard to demonstrate their understanding of how to collect data and create a graph on their own. They chose a topic, created a question and then collected data from their classmates. With this data, they created either a pictograph or a bar graph to represent the information. We also learned to play a new math card game, which is really easy to play at home too! It is called addition flash. Take one deck of cards and split it in half. Each player places their half face down in front of them. At the same time, each player will flip their top card. The first person to add both numbers together gets to keep the pair. Keep playing until all the cards are gone. Whoever has more pairs wins. Something we have been exploring together this year is how to answer the question: where are we? To help us visualize where we are we have started to create a flipbook that will represent all the places we live in. To start, we talked about our community, Cranston. We recorded all of the things that help us know when we are in Cranston, like our school and the windmill. We also talked about the city that our community is in, Calgary. We recorded all of the things that help us know we are in Calgary, like the Bow River, the Calgary Tower and the Saddledome. We will continue working on this project for the next couple of weeks. Another highlight this week was starting our first Science unit of the year. We will be looking at liquids for the next month or so. To start us off we looked at the most common liquid of all- water. We used our five senses to observe and describe water. Afterwards, we learned about how much water is in the world and discovered that it covers over half of the earth! Over the next few weeks we will be exploring how liquids move, where they come from and what we use liquids for. To get us ready to start literacy centers, we learned some new word work activities and games this week. We learned to play an easy version of bananagrams, which is just like scrabble. We also played a version of boggle, where we need to find words in word search, but we aren't given the words to look for. Another easy activity to try at home is called making words. Pick one vowel (or two!) and 5-7 consonants. Have your child try to make as many 1 letter, 2 letter, 3 letter and 4 letter words from them. It is important for them to start to recognize the patterns within words and how longer words are often made up of smaller words or sounds. Here is an example: Have a great long weekend! It's Friday the 13th, and we are marking the end of another week together. This week we talked more about our friendly 10s, creating ten frames that represented each of the friendly 10 facts. We also started looking at how we can represent numbers. As a class we brainstormed lots of different ways to show a number including drawing a picture, writing the number word, using tally marks, ten frames, dice, dominoes and fingers. We also started to talk about how we can use a number sentence to represent a number. For example : 9+2 =11 is a way to represent 11. We will be continuing to build our understanding of how we represent numbers over the next few weeks, building up to representing larger numbers. We are also continuing to work on graphing. This week we learned about bar graphs and practiced creating one together. Next week we will be collecting our own data and creating a bar graph with it. During calendar, one of our daily routines, we look at patterning, counting and problem solving using a calendar. Part of our calendar time is counting the days of school so far. For this we are using place value blocks. We are also keeping track of the weather by adding to a pictograph every day. Ask your child why it is called a pictograph, they should be able to tell you. Our writing focus this week was on building a sentence. We have learned that a sentence must have four things:
Ask your child to explain the what and doing in this sentence: The dog played in the grass. We are also learning some games to help us practice our sight words. This week we played bingo as a class and next week we are going to practice in small groups. To support both reading and writing, we will be using a spelling program called Words Their Way. This program is designed to help students learn the patterns and 'rules' that are common in the english language. For this program it is important to know which spelling patterns students know, and which they don't, so we have a starting point. This week we did a spelling test that helps me see where each student is at. In the next couple of weeks we will be learning how the program works and by October, I will be sending home spelling words every two weeks. This year we will be using mindfulness to help us with our learning in the classroom and around the school. To be mindful we have to work on calming our brain, and understanding what it means to be mindful. To help us, we are using a program called Mind UP. This week we learned about our brains, and how our brain helps us (or sometimes makes it tricky) to be mindful. Here is a picture and an explanation of what we learned about: This week we worked on our identity projects. Thank you to everyone who helped at home with sentences. We also painted our backgrounds and took special pictures that will all come together for our final collage. You can check them out next week at meet the teacher! Now that we have spent some time thinking about ourselves as individuals, we are starting to talk about where we are and what places we belong to and live in. Next week we will continue to explore this as we map out our community, city, province and country.
Have a great weekend, see you next week! Ms. Brett Welcome Back! We have had a great first week together in room twenty-four. This week we have spent time getting to know each other and learning some of the routines that we will have this year in grade 2. We also had a special visitor with us on Tuesday and Wednesday, Ms. Radloff. She is a student teacher from Mount Royal University who will be joining us again for six weeks in November. This year we are going to be using the Circle of Courage in our class. The Circle of Courage is a great way for all of us to learn about ourselves and each other and make sure our classroom community is a kind, happy and safe place to be. This week we learned about one part of the circle, belonging. Through books and short films we talked about what belonging is and how we can show belonging to each other in our classroom. Here are some of the ideas we came up with: An important part of belonging is knowing and feeling like you belong. One of the ways we do that at school is by having students and teachers help to make the classroom feel like a place for everyone. We spent some time this week decorating and making our classroom feel like our own. We made name tags, decorated book boxes and did some art projects. One art project that we worked hard on was a self-portrait. We practiced drawing faces, spent time drawing our own, and then used tissue paper to turn our self-portraits into colourful art pieces. We can't wait to share them with you at meet the teacher. We also spent time writing this week. Writing will be an important part of our year in grade 2 and we will learn how to share our ideas and create stories through writing. This week students wrote about their summer vacations, their family and they wrote their first TWAS (This Week at School). TWAS books will come home at the end of every week, so make sure you read them over the weekend! In addition to writing, reading is a big part of grade 2. Even though we won't start home reading for a few more weeks, we have started DEAR (drop everything and read) in our classroom. This is an opportunity for students to continue to develop positive reading habits by choosing books they enjoy, developing reading stamina and learning to read on their own. DEAR is for independent reading, and our class read aloud is for students to develop listening comprehension and enjoy a book that may be beyond their reading level otherwise. Our first read aloud this year is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In the next few weeks we will be starting guided reading and literacy centers that will both help students develop their reading and writing skills further. This week we started to learn about graphing in math, something we will be looking at throughout the year. Graphs are helpful ways for us to see information easily. We created a birthday graph together and started a weather graph to track the weather. Next week we will learn about making bar graphs and pictographs by ourselves. We are also starting the year by learning about a SUPER important mental math strategy called Friendly 10s. In math, the number 10 is very helpful and knowing how to make ten is something all students should confidently know by the end of the year. Mental math requires that students be able to compute basic facts in their head, and apply that knowledge to other, more complex computations. Learning the friendly 10s, and knowing them automatically is a goal for all students this year. Here are the friendly 10s: There are lots of ways to practice these mental math facts, and I encourage everyone to practice them at home. An easy game we learned this week is called friendly 10 fish. All you need is a deck of cards with the face cards removed. To play you follow the same rules as go fish, except instead of making pairs you are making 10. For example, if you have a 6 in your hand, you will ask for a 4.
I hope everyone has a great weekend! Ms.Brett |
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