Happy Halloween!
I hope everyone has a great night trick-or-treating and an even better weekend recovering from all the sugar! This week we enjoyed our field trip to the Glenbow Museum, which was a great place to wrap up our unit on our community in the past. Being able to see a real tipi, and touch real artifacts from both Indigenous people and the settlers who came here, really helped bring our exploration to life. We will be continuing to talk about different communities across Canada this year, connecting back to all the learning we have done around our community, both past and present, as we go. Thank you to all our volunteers who made the trip possible! Our writing focus has continued to be on descriptive writing this week, as we brainstormed, sorted and practiced using adjectives to make our writing juicer and more interesting. In the next few weeks we will begin working on some special writing projects that will help us practice using adjectives, adverbs and other descriptive writing tools. This week we looked at even and odd numbers in math. These can be tricky for students to remember, and it is something easy that you can practice at home. We learned that you can tell if any number is even or odd by looking at the digit in the ones place (on the end). If it is even, then the whole number is even. If it is odd, then the whole number is odd. Next week is our Remembrance Day assembly, which we are working hard on preparing. Students have been working hard to learn new songs in music, and we are also working on a special Acknowledgement of the Land project in class. Both will be shared at the assembly. Check the weekly email for more information. Have a spooktacular night and long weekend! Ms.Brett
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This week we have been exploring words and how special words help to make our sentences more interesting. First, we learned about the two types of words that are in every sentence: nouns and verbs. Ask your child to tell you what a noun is and what a verb is, they should know! We practiced writing sentences with just nouns and verbs. For example: The dog runs. The teacher talks. We decided these were pretty boring, so next we learned about adjectives and adverbs, which describe nouns and verbs, and make our writing more exciting and more interesting. We brainstormed lots of juicy descriptive words, and added them into our sentences. For example: The black dog runs quickly. The tall teacher talks loudly. For the next few weeks we will be working on some exciting projects that will help us practice our descriptive writing, making our writing more interesting and detailed.
In Math this week we have been talking more about our hundreds chart, and exploring how we can use it to help us count, add and subtract. To use a hundreds chart effectively, it is helpful to know exactly where different numbers are on it. To help us we made hundreds chart puzzles, which your child brought home on Wednesday. Next, we started to look at patterns in the hundreds chart. We are starting by looking at how the hundreds chart is organized into groups of 10. Across the hundreds chart their are rows of 10, and going down the hundreds chat each column counts by 10. An important skill in grade 2 is skip counting, and for the rest of the year students will be working on building up their understanding and comfort with skip counting by 2, 5 and 10, all the way to 100. By the end of the year they should also be able to do this backwards as well! To help encourage students to practice their skip counting, they have each been given the task of completing "missions". When a child feels that they are able to complete a mission, they perform the skill for me, and then move on to another. Their goal is to try their best, and complete as many as possible by the end of the year. Here are the missions we will work on throughout the year: - skip count by 10: from 0 to 100 and from 100 to 0 - skip count by 5: from 0 to 100 and from 100 to 0 - skip count by 2: from 0 to 100 and from 100 to 0 - use flexibility: skip count by 2, 5, 10 from any given number between 1-9. For example, count by 10 from starting at 3 Some of these are tricky! They take patience and practice, but we have lots of time and we will have lots of opportunities to practice in class throughout the year. Ask your child what they are working on, and feel free to help them practice at home by writing them out, counting in the car or quizzing them when they think they are ready. As skip counting gets stronger and students become more flexible in their ability to skip count from different numbers, they will be able to use skip counting to help them add and subtract. This week we focused a lot on how Calgary came to be and exploring what it looked like in the past. Did you know this area used to have very few trees? Check out this website for some cool pictures that show how Calgary has changed over time. When we visit the Glenbow next week we will be able to check out some artifacts and learn more about how life here has changed over time. As we reach the end of our liquids unit we are beginning to discuss how we can help make sure we take care of the water in our world. This week we learned about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Here is a link to a video that explains more about it. We brainstormed some ways that we can help protect the ocean, the animals in it and the water that we need to survive. Even though we live in Cranston, where there is no ocean, we can do lots to help here. Ask your child to share some ways they can help. Have a great weekend! Ms.Brett This short week flew by.
For math we have continued to focus on place value, and practicing building and recognizing numbers using place value. We are using games like bingo and concentration to help with our recognition of place value, as well as activities that require us to build numbers using place value blocks and record them in different ways. We had our first WTW test this week, and when they come home you will notice that each word gets two points, one for being spelt correctly and one for being in the right category. In the coming months students will get more familiar with this routine and how to practice their words at home and at school, and they will be able to start applying what they are learning through this spelling program to their reading and writing. We continue to work on our writing everyday, as well as reading. This week we continued to explore the water cycle. We started an experiment that demonstrates evaporation by filling two cups with the same amount of water, covering one and leaving one open. Students hypothesized which cup would lose more water and why. Ask your child how it is going, we will check our cups on Monday to see the final result. As we continue to learn about the past, we are starting to dig into what life was like here for both Indigenous people and settlers. We are exploring how the settlers got here, where they went and what they did. Next week we will begin looking at Calgary specifically and how it became the city it is today. We also received our first post cards this week from Kamloops and PEI. Students loved being able to read them, find the places on a map and learn more about the people and places they came from. We hope we lots more this year! Have a great weekend, Ms. Brett This week we have continued to learn about liquids, exploring their different properties. On Monday we learned about evaporation and condensation, which led us into a conversation about the water cycle and how water can change from a liquid to a gas, and back into a liquid. We also talked about what happens to water when it freezes and how we can turn ice back into water. We will continue to explore evaporation and the water cycle next week. As we begin to dive deeper into the past we are creating a timeline of what has happened in this place. We know that Indigenous people were the first people to live here, and that they camped in different locations, never building permanent houses. We also know that at some point, settlers arrived and they began building houses that were more permanent. This week we explored how the bison were important to the Indigenous people and why they started to disappear once settlers arrived. To help us imagine life so long ago we have begun reading a new class read aloud, Little House in the Big Woods. In the coming weeks we will be learning about how settlers eventually built and created the city of Calgary. Our math focus this week was on place value. We have begun to look at how place value works and what the different digits in a number represent. To help us we have started looking at 4 different forms of a number: Students have been practicing building numbers with place value blocks and writing them in both expanded and standard form. This practice will help us a lot when we start to look at adding and subtracting two digit numbers later on in the year. Next week we will continue with this focus to help us strengthen our understanding.
This week we started our first official round of Words Their Way (WTW). Hopefully everyone's word sorts made it home and you are starting to work together to learn and practice the different spelling patterns. We will have our first WTW test on these words next Friday. This week students have also been working hard on achieving their writing goals. Everyone has a small goal they are working towards in their writing. Ask your child what their goal is. We will continue to create and work towards mini goals throughout the year to help make sure we are always improving our writing. I hope everyone has an excellent long weekend, eats lots and enjoys some time with family. Ms.Brett We started our week by recognizing Orange Shirt Day. One of the messages of Orange Shirt Day is that every child matters and as a whole school, we did an activity to help represent this. Each child reflected on how they feel belonging and in their special memories and then they drew or wrote their ideas onto a leaf. In our hub, all of the leaves are now hanging up to represent how important each child in our school is.
This week we continued to learn math games that support our mental math. We have been learning games that use addition so this week we practiced some that use subtraction. Two games that are easy to play at home are race to 0 (using a number line) and race to 1 (using a hundreds chart). In both games students start at the highest number and roll a dice to move backwards (subtracting) until they get to the lowest number. We are also starting to talk about place value, and we will continue to explore place value next week. Our exploration of where we are continued this week as we explored our country, Canada, and our planet, Earth. We now know that we live in Cranston, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and Earth. We also know what makes each of these places special and how they fit together. We have begun talking about how this place (Calgary) has changed to become what it is now. To help us we are creating a timeline, starting when there were only Indigenous people living here. We will explore how this place has changed as settlers arrived and the city of Calgary was slowly built. Our trip to the Glenbow will help us with this learning at the end of the month. This year we will be learning about communities across Canada, keep an eye out for the email about our special postcard project coming home today. We hope you can help us! In Science this week we learned about viscosity, which is how think a liquid is. To help us learn about it we had a liquid race. We raced water, oil, honey, corn syrup, dish soap and molasses. Ask your child which one won and which one lost. Next week we will continue to explore different properties of liquids. Our literacy focus this week was on spelling routines. We got new personal dictionaries and we are learning how to use them to search for words we don't know how to spell. We also learned about our spelling program, words their way. This week we all practiced with the same words, but next week different groups will get different words. First, we learned how to sort our words into the categories they belong in. Next, we learned how to write out a sort in our books. Finally, we learned some fun ways to practice them. We learned how to do a word hunt (which is kind of tricky at first) and search for the words in a book. We also learned how to do a blind sort, which is a great way for us to practice spelling and sorting our words. More information will come home on Monday when students will be bringing home their first word sort of the year. Have a great weekend! Ms. Brett |
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