Monday, September 21

Hi parents,

We had a pretty good day today. Mondays are nice because they are very routine-driven. Every Monday, the students are introduced to new spelling words, and write in their journals about their weekends. I encourage students in Grade 1 to try to write two sentences, and students in Grade 2 to write three sentences. Often, I find that students need to be prompted to elaborate on their ideas. For instance, they will write "On the weekend I played.", and then not know what else to write. Encouraging students to focus on one idea and add detail to it is a great way to help them write additional sentences, and it's a good writing skill too.

We watched a video about Terry Fox today and had a brief class discussion afterwards. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BzyHYZgMz8 

I think that is my favourite Terry Fox video because it focuses so much on all that Terry accomplished. Our class will be participating in the Terry Fox Run on Thursday, so we're going to be learning a lot about Terry over the course of the week.

In Math, we continued to focus on the number 10. Today we brainstormed different ways to make 10. Practicing 'making 10' at home is an awesome way to help kids develop mental math skills. Today we did a quick activity where I asked the students to hold up any number of fingers, and then count the number of fingers they were not holding up.  Fingers Up + Fingers Down = 10. They thought that was pretty cool.

We went out to the front of the school and studied the crabapple Trees. I showed the students where the seeds were in each apple. We also talked about how crabapples are different from regular apples.

At the end of the day, we read a book about Lego figures and the students coloured in their own bank 'minifigures'.

Have a nice night!

Zac