Thursday, October 8

 Hi parents,

I am going to be away this afternoon so I thought I'd update the Blog now. We've had a pretty good day so far!

We watched a Canada Crew video about the four seasons and the weather in Canada. It actually felt more like a science lesson than social studies. It talked a lot about how rain is important, even though most of us don't like rainy days.

We went for a walk to a park that is about 100m away from the school. We did not get to go on the playground, but the students explored the space and had a lot of fun finding big leaves and sticks. I challenged the students to imagine they were explorers, pioneers, or indigenous people, who were the very first humans to ever set foot in this park. We talked about what we might name a place like this. The students came up with some awesome ideas: "big leaf park", "see saw park", "Trees Park" were a few I can remember. I explained the to class how the names they came up with are a lot like the sorts of names early people would have given places as well. We talked about how the Blackfoot people gave the name  "Mokinsis" to the area that we now know as Calgary, because Mokinsis is the Blackfoot word for "elbow", and Calgary is built beside a river that bends like an elbow.

All around it was a pretty cool discussion! We also had some great opportunities to practice crossing the road safely. And, we saw a woodpecker. 

When we got back to class, the students did their final Number Spotlight page on the number 20. I think we're going to pause here for a while and spend some time building a stronger understanding of numbers up to 20. I think the students could use more practice with identifying numbers that are "one more" or "one less" than a given quantity. For the Grade 2's, I plan to focus on "10 more" and "10 less", and "5 more" and "5 less". Any math practice that you do at home will also go a long way - in terms of building basic 'number sense', you really can't go wrong. Addition flash cards, counting, skip counting, drawing tallies, writing numbers, counting backwards, mad minutes, rolling dice... you name it, it all helps! If it involves numbers in any way, I am all for it. :)

We reread the book "School for Dads" and the students responded to this writing prompt, "What would you teach your mom / dad?" Their responses were funny and cute.

We also had the Spelling Quiz!

I'll post next weeks' words tomorrow (which is a PD Day - no school!) Have a nice weekend!

Zac