January 25th

Hi Parents,


This week we started new literacy and math centers. The students really seemed to enjoy our new centers.
For literacy centers we are continuing to work on our sight words through sight word bingo on abcya.com and our word families using magnetic letters. For our listening center students are now drawing and writing about their favourite character in the story. We also introduced two new centers. The first is students are making a Winter Book, where they describe how they know it is winter. The second is a center where students are given pictures out of order. They have to cut these pictures out, put them in order and then colour them. The second time they go to this center they will be writing a story based off of the pictures. This is to help them start to sequence stories together.

For our new math centers students are working on practicing their skills for making 10 and addition. The first center is called Find 10 Go Fish, where students are trying to find cards that make 10 (refer to blog post on January 11th for detailed rules).
The second center is a  game called Make 10, which is an independent game, where students have four cards in front of them and they have to try and make 10 with the cards. If they are able to make 10 they take those cards off and add in more cards to fill the empty spaces. If they can't make 10 with any of the cards they are allowed to switch out one card from the deck.
The third center is a game called Addition Connect Four, where students roll two dice, add them together and then colour in that number on their board. The first student to connect 4 wins.
The fourth center is Number Puzzles.  Students have been given ten frames and 100's charts that have been broken up in different ways. The students have to try and put them together again.
The fifth center is Marble Addition on ABCya.com, where students are given an addition problem to solve. They have marbles that they can use to help them solve the problems, if they need. This game has different levels, which increase in difficulty. Once you pass one level you unlock the next.

Our words of the week this week were: how, now, then, your 
Our words of the week next week will be: has, make, want, who

We also did our first making words lesson. We were given strips of folded paper, on each square we wrote a letter. The letters we were given were a,c,c,h,r,s,t. We worked together as class and learned that these seven letters can help us make two letter, three letter, four letter, and five letter words. We made words such as at, art, star trash, chart. We also discovered that when put in the write order these seven letters can make the mystery word Scratch.

In Science we continued our inquiry of colours. We did a variety of mixing colour experiments. The first one was a continued part of a lesson from last week, where students were given two colours and had to make a hypothesis of what colour would come from mixing them together. We then used paint to find out.
The second experiment was what would happen to the three primary colours when mixed with white. The third experiment was what would happen to the primary colours when we mixed them with black. Students wrote their hypothesis, tested it by mixing paint and then wrote a conclusion of what happened. We also learned that colours mixed with white are called a tint and colours mixed with black are called a shade.
We also read the story "Leon the Chameleon" about a chameleon named Leon who always changed to the opposite colour instead of blending in. For example when he sat on a green leaf, we would change to green's complimentary colour of red. The class really enjoyed this story. We also watched the "Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow" and learned about how colour and light are connected!

We finished our read aloud of "Flat Stanley" and will be starting another Flat Stanley read aloud next week.

We also had the first session of our second club for this year! We were very excited about our new clubs!

We worked really hard this week on getting our assembly ready. Everyone did an amazing job today! Well done Room 80! :)

Reminders:

Wednesday January 30th is Fun Lunch. Don't forget to still pack a snack!

Thursday January 31st Byblos Bakery is coming in to make a presentation about nutrition. Students will also get to make a healthy snack. This is in the afternoon so please still pack a morning snack for your child.

Friday February 1st is No School

Thursday February 14th and Friday February 15th is Teacher's Convention, No School

Monday February 18th is Family Day-No School

Thursday February 21st is our field trip to Fort Calgary