Today we started playing ukuleles in music! If you have your own at home, students are welcome to bring them to music class.
We continued our word work with word families today. Students are working on identifying certain word families (-in, -ig, -ou) and finding those words within a reading passage, then coming up with their own words that weren't in the text. We will practice these words by creating sentences with them. We played a math game today using our mental math strategy of making 10. Students flipped over a playing card and had to quickly say which other number paired with it to make ten (ex. if a 6 was pulled, they would say 4). There is a dance next Thursday! Please see attached photo for more information.
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Today we worked on our writing using the prompt "if you could have any super power, what would it be and why?". Students used their imaginations, choosing powers like super speed, or teleportation of objects.
In math, we continued with money. Students are becoming more comfortable with naming each coin and how much it is worth. We are continuing to work on adding change together, and working on skip counting by 25s. We started karate today! There are two senseis who are teaching us karate, and who also taught us that the word "sensei" means teacher in Japanese. We will have 8 sessions with our senseis, working on punches, kicks, and other karate skills. We started an art project today using oil pastels. We will begin studying the arctic land formation in social studies, so we did some polar bear art to go along with our learning. Students are using warm and cool oil pastels to colour in the profile of a polar bear. Once fully coloured, we will add patterns and details by scratching out some of the pastel. School Council and Parent Association is hosting a meeting at the North Haven learning commons tonight at 6pm. Everyone is welcome! They have coordinated a lot of exciting upcoming events, such as our Kanto Sho Karate, Spring Fundraiser and our Saint Patrick’s Day dance. Kanto Sho Karate will be here for the next two weeks teaching us the fundamentals of karate. The Spring fundraiser is Big Deal Box Cards! Please return the flyer (order form is on the back) in a ziploc bag with the appropriate amount by March 19th. Our Saint Patrick’s Day dance on March 19th from 5:30pm-7:30pm. Tickets at $2.00 at the door. Thanks for supporting North Haven! We will also be having a Grade 1/2 Celebration of Learning this Friday, March 13th at 9:00am. Hope to see you there! School Council and Parent Association is hosting a meeting at the North Haven learning commons tonight at 6pm. Everyone is welcome! They have coordinated a lot of exciting upcoming events, such as our Kanto Sho Karate, Spring Fundraiser and our Saint Patrick’s Day dance. Kanto Sho Karate will be here for the next two weeks teaching us the fundamentas of karate. The Spring fundraiser is Big Deal Box Cards! Please return the flyer (order form is on the back) in a ziploc bag with the appropriate amount by March 19th. Our Saint Patrick’s Day dance on March 19th from 5:30pm-7:30pm. Tickets at $2.00 at the door. Thanks for supporting North Haven! We will also be having a Grade ½ Celebration of Learning this Friday, March 13th at 9:00am. Hope to see you there! School Council and Parent Association is hosting a meeting at the North Haven learning commons tonight at 6pm. Everyone is welcome! They have coordinated a lot of exciting upcoming events, such as our Kanto Sho Karate, Spring Fundraiser and our Saint Patrick’s Day dance. Kanto Sho Karate will be here for the next two weeks teaching us the fundamentas of karate. The Spring fundraiser is Big Deal Box Cards! Please return the flyer (order form is on the back) in a ziploc bag with the appropriate amount by March 19th. Our Saint Patrick’s Day dance on March 19th from 5:30pm-7:30pm. Tickets at $2.00 at the door. Thanks for supporting North Haven! We will also be having a Grade ½ Celebration of Learning this Friday, March 13th at 9:00am. Hope to see you there! Today was our 2nd day of lacrosse. We practiced our tricks that we learned yesterday, and learned how to shoot the ball into the net. To finish, we played a relay race, trying to score as many goals as possible.
We are continuing with story writing. We read the book "Ninja Red Riding Hood" by Corey Rosen Schwartz, and as a class we plotted out the beginning, middle, and end. Students are becoming more proficient at identifying which information is the most important in a story. In math, we worked on a problem solving question. Students were given the information that there were 3 flowers, each with 2 leaves, a lady bug on each leaf, and each lady bug had 3 spots, and were tasked with figuring out the totals of each item. Students drew the information as a strategy, and totaled everything up. We had a busy day of residencies today! We worked with Shirley Hill again today and made Indigenous dance hoops. Small groups worked as a team to put different coloured electrical tape around a hoop.
In math, we are continuing with our mental math strategies. Today we focused on "friends of 10", figuring out which numbers add together to make 10. Students played a game, rolling a 10 sided dice, and finding the number that pairs with it to make 10. We started our lacrosse residency today. Students worked on various skills like flipping the pancake, circling the ball, and balancing it on the side of the stick. We will continue playing lacrosse tomorrow as well! Thank you to all community members that were able to attend our performance last Friday with Shirley Hill, Indigenous Elder and Artist. We are excited to have another week with her where we will focus on Indigenous ways of knowing through the buffalo and regalia making. We will also be welcoming ELEV8 Lacrosse to teach us the skills and fundamentals of lacrosse. Our School Council and Parent Association Meeting is next week, Monday March 9th at 6pm in the North Haven learning commons. Everyone is welcome! Come join the conversation in regards to fundraisers, events, and residencies in our school. We are going to have a St. Patrick’s School Dance hosted by our Parent Council Association on March 19th from 5:30-7:30. Tickets will be $2.00 at the door. Today in room 8 we read a book called "Of Course It's a Big Deal!" by Bryan Smith. We are learning how to react calmly and appropriately, especially when things do not go as planned. We talked about flexible thinking (being able to change our plan if things don't go as expected), and how getting stuck on an idea can cause us more frustration than finding a different solution. We are using the language "big deal" and "little deal" to describe the size of the problem and to match our reaction to how big a deal the problem is. We learned 4 steps to reacting calmly:
In social studies, we watched a video about a robot being a hall monitor to make sure students in a middle school were stay in class. Students wrote and drew their opinion on if they thought that was a good idea or not. We are practicing using opinion language, stating "I think...because". In math, we continued learning about time. Last week students made a timeline of their day. Today we used our timeline to figure out how much time elapsed between each event throughout their day. It is starting to warm up! We will be heading to Nose Hill Park on Thursday afternoon, weather permitting. We got a big surprise today going down to the sensory room. Our Physical and Occupational therapists redesigned the sensory room! This morning we got ready to learn through sensory and physical regulation using new and exciting equipment. There is now a floating mat that resembles a pirate ship, an area for scootering, a throwing area, and "waves" to parkour over. We are so fortunate to have the opportunity to have such a great space to help us get our brains and bodies ready to learn.
In math we are working on adding money together by playing a dice game. Students rolled the dice and picked out coins or bills that corresponded to the different numbers on the dice, then added them together. We are also learning to count by 25s to help us with adding quarters together. We did literacy centers today, focusing on sight words, consonant sounds, and rhyming words. We rotated through 3 different games to work on these skills. Shirley Hill is back with us this week! We are making an amazing collage of a buffalo. Our PLP class is joined by the Bridges class and together we are creating a buffalo out of different paper materials and faux fur. In social studies we continued building our geographical landforms. We are now creating the interior plains using plasticine. First we made the prairies in the southern portion of the landform, then we made lakes and forests in the north part. We are almost done working on the plains and then will move onto the arctic. We continued dancing with Shirley Hill today. Students learned the friendship dance and how to make a war cry. We also hoop danced while Shirley walked around and blew bubbles. Our performance will be on Friday morning at 11am.
For Pink Shirt Day, we read a book called "The Juice Box Bully" by Bob Sornson and Maria Dismondy. It talks about a class that makes a promise to stand up for each other and not tolerate bad behaviour. We talked about bullies, and how often they are bullied themselves, and they start to pick on other people as a defense mechanism. We all made a promise to be kind and to stand up to others when they are being unkind or showing bad behaviour. We made paper juice boxes, decorated them, and wrote our promise on them. In math we continued working on addition strategies. We are now working on "friends of 10": numbers that add together to make 10. This strategy will help students break larger numbers apart to make 10s for simpler mental math. Today we started learning about story writing. We briefly talked about the elements in a story, such as theme, problem, characters, and beginning/middle/end. Then students were given the task of writing an original story. We planned our stories using sequencing words (first, next, then, last) with a 4 square to organize it, then wrote down what we planned. We will learn about stories and story writing over the next few weeks. Once we have a better understanding of stories, we will write a new story, and compare it to our first one (where we knew very little about narrative writing). Students will be able to see their progress in this style of writing.
Shirley Hill led us today with a smudge, taught us about some Indigenous cultures, and taught us some traditional hoop dancing. She will be with us for the next two days as well. There will be a dance performance on Friday at 11am. We continued learning about money today. We played Kahoot to test out our knowledge of coins and their values. Pink Shirt Day This year, Pink Shirt Day, or Anti-Bullying Day, is on February 26. It is a day when people come together by wearing pink shirts to school or work to show they are against bullying. The focus for 2020 is "lift each other up." North Haven Leadership students will be back on the 'kindness patrol' all week, looking for evidence of students making kind choices to lift each other up. Please talk as a family about the huge positive impact that choosing kindness can have on the life of another person. Today in guided reading, students focused on the -et (pet, set) and -at (pat, sat) families, as well as the aw vowel sound (crawl). First, they went through their reading passage and highlighted all of the sounds they were looking for. Then they read the passage independently, then we read it as a group. After reading, students answered comprehension questions, trying to independently write their answers.
In math we learned about the addition strategy of counting on. We played math bingo as a whole class to get a lot of practice. Students are working on identifying the greater number in a problem, and counting on from that number to get their answer (9 + 3, start at 9 and count up 3 instead of counting 9 first and then 3). We are working with sums between 1 and 20 to solidify this concept before moving on to higher digits. In art we made mixed media hearts. Students painted white paper with red, orange, and purple tones. Then, we used watercolours on newspaper to create an interesting multicolour design. Next, we stenciled a heart onto the newspaper and cut out the heart. Finally, we glued the newspaper heart onto the white paper. After art, we handed out cards and goodies to each other for valentine's day! No school Thurs/Fri/Mon! We will see you back on Tuesday the 18th! Today we worked on some independent writing. Students were asked to pick a topic of interest to them and write as much as they could on that topic. Each student was encouraged to sound out their words and work on completing full sentences with a subject, object, and verb.
In math we continued to work on money. Students are learning to count 5, 10, and 20 dollar bills and find the sum of 2 bills added together. We have also been working on subitizing - the ability to quickly identify the number of a small set without counting them (knowing there are 3 dots on a dice). We played a game of rolling 10 dice and trying to get all the same number showing. We will continue to work on subitizing up to 10. This week we have put a large focus on kindness. Today we read a book about kindness and that we can do small things like saying please/thank you, or drawing a picture for your friend. There are also other acts of kindness that are a bit harder, such as standing up for a friend. Students learned that both are important and that being kind to one another makes the other person feel good, and that they will feel good for being kind too. We made friendship bracelets for someone we care about to try and make their day better and fill their bucket. Tomorrow we will be celebrating Valentine's day. Students can bring in cards for everyone in the class and we will be doing more activities surrounding friendship and kindness. |
AuthorI am originally from Saskatchewan but now call Calgary home. My background is in inclusive education and I am passionate about supporting students who are exceptionally abled. I love getting out to the mountains, hiking, and taking in all the beautiful sights. I also love traveling which took me to Vietnam last fall to teach English for 3 months. Archives
March 2020
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