Welcome to a New School Year

Our Class!

 

We spent some time this week getting to know our classmates. We played a few games, had a sharing circle and completed a class name word search. 

We also worked on a collaborative class slide presentation. Once this is complete, it will be made into a class book that the students can read during Read to Self time. 

Read to Self is an important part of our daily routine. During this block of time, the students are encouraged to choose reading material at their level and on topics that interest them. Beginning next week, the students will start the 40 BOOK CHALLENGE, exposing them to many different genres. They are encouraged to choose their books with this sheet guiding them, trying to fill as many boxes as they can. 

 

Our first writing project this week was "All about My #SELFIE". The students wrote in complete sentences about themselves, including information such as their siblings, pets, age and some of their favourite things. They then drew a picture of themselves, using pencil crayons to match their features. These turned out so well and are now on display on our BRAVO BOARD at the back of our class!

Our Art project, "My Life in APPS", went along with our writing project. The students did a fantastic job illustrating 9 different apps, displaying their favourite and most important things in their lives.

We started a read aloud novel this week. Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt is about a girl who hides her inability to read by creating clever yet disruptive distractions. She is afraid to ask for help but eventually a teacher sees through her behaviour and is able to help her grow and build her confidence. The class is really enjoying this story and we have spent a lot of time talking about the events that have taken place. We started off with a prediction page, thinking about the title and what the story could be about. 

In Social Studies we started our Mapping unit. We began by brainstorming a class list of all the different Landforms the students could come up with. We then watched a short video describing some of the main landforms in more detail. Finally, the students began their Landforms Visual Dictionaries. We started with the prairies/plains, mountains, lakes and valleys. We will continue our visual dictionaries next week. 

In Math we started our Patterns unit. We also began our daily routine of completing Xtra Math basic facts on the computer. This activity takes about 5 minutes and challenges the students, at their level, on the basic math facts of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The students progress through the levels at their own rate. 

We also completed a group activity answering various questions about being a good student, what respect looks like, the rules we need for our classroom, how we can make learning fun and how we can become better readers. The students were assigned small groups to work in. They wrote their own answer to the question they were given and then worked with their group members to create one "best answer" using everyone's ideas.