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.
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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. Room 8 did such an amazing job at the drumming assembly today!! It was so exciting to celebrate all their hard work and practice.
Students are continuing to work on their self-regulation strategies. We spent time in the sensory room to help us regulate our minds and bodies for more focused learning. Students are growing in their confidence using the equipment and they are building strength and endurance. In word work today we did 3 centers: sight words paired with sentences, synonyms, and sentence building. Students are working on developing full sentences using a variety of new words. They are self monitoring their sentences to ensure that they have a subject, object, and verb, and that the sentence makes sense. Today we started new work in guided reading. Students were given a short passage to read with comprehension questions to follow. Each passage had a repeating vowel sound (ex. ai in paid or plain) or belonged to a word family (ex. -ad in bad or mad). Students went through the passage and highlighted all of the repeating sounds, then read the passage on their own, then as a group. Finally, they answered the comprehension questions using full sentences.
In math we started learning our doubles math facts using pictures to help us remember. We learned that 9 + 9 = 18, and to think of a semi truck (eighteen wheels) to help remember this. We will be building our mental math strategies off of these facts. We continued painting our cordillera landforms today. Students added more snow to the peaks of their mountain tops and added forests along the base of the mountains. We will be moving on to learning about the interior plains next! Tomorrow is our drumming assembly. Please join us at 10:30am in the gym! Today in math we worked on adding double digits together. Students are learning about stacking numbers and to start on the right side of the numbers before moving to the left. Students will continue to work on addition facts and strategies such as adding double (7+7), doubles +/- 1 (7+8), and making ten. We also worked on skip counting today to help students see patterns in numbers and gain a better sense of numbers.
We started painting our cordillera land regions today! Students laid a base coat of grays and browns to their mountains and added some other land features such as lakes, rivers, trees, and forests. Tomorrow we will continue painting our cordilleras, adding more detail, like the white snow peaks on the mountain tops. Today we started to visualize a story to help us better understand what is happening. We listened to a Cree story called The Granddaughter who was Eaten by a Big Fish (click here to listen). Students drew the pictures they saw in their minds as they listened to the story, using the sequencing words "first, next, then, last". We will continue to do work with visualizing to help us develop better comprehension.
In math we had 3 centers set up for students to rotate through. They worked on representing numbers into the hundreds with base 10 blocks, number bonds, counting money, and finding the equivalent money for different coins (2 dimes = 4 nickels). We are continuing to learn about Canada in social studies. Students are working on labeling provinces, identifying each province when they look at a map, and knowing which order the provinces go in from west to east. Today in room 8 we continued writing our pen pal letters to our friends in Abu Dhabi. After answering all of the questions their pen pal asked, students asked questions about what life is like in the United Arab Emirates. The students were shocked to hear that maybe some of their pen pals had never seen snow! On Thursday we learned about the cordillera land form and what provinces it spans across. We started building the landforms using various materials like foam, newspaper, egg cartons, and straws. Students then paper mached their sculpts. We continued building our cordillera landforms today and we will paint them on Wednesday. We talked more about unexpected vs. expected behaviours at school. Students worked in groups to sort expected and unexpected behaviours and talked about how someone would feel if they did one of those things (ex. yelling at a friend). Students are continuing to learn what is expected of them during whole class instruction, such as raising their hand and waiting to be called on when they have something to contribute. Last Thursday we were very fortunate to get to see at wolf! Her name is Flora and she is 7 years old. She came to visit us from Northern Lights Wildlife Wolf Centre in Golden, BC. Although we were not allowed to pet the wolf, students got to pet a wolf and coyote pelt. Healthy Hunger!
The Parent Association is offering 4 more options in February and March. Please sign up at www.healthyhunger.ca Proceeds of these Fun Lunches and Snacks help the school directly. Snacks costs as little as $2!! And both lunches have a small option so students don't have to order a full meal if they choose. February 21- Kernels Popcorn February 27- Little Ceases March 13- Kernels Popcorn March 18- Edo Japan We would like to invite you to join us for the drumming assembly on Friday February 7that 10:30am. The North Haven students have been learning to play djembes (African drums) in music class for the past few weeks. The classes have prepared performance pieces filled with interesting and often complex rhythm patterns based on traditional melodies. Come and enjoy the performances and be amazed at the level of skill that our North Haven students have achieved! |
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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