Monday, February 22

 Hi parents,

We had a great day today, a very typical Monday with typical Monday activities.

In the morning, the students learned about the rights and responsibilities of children at school. We talked about how all students have the right to learn at school, but the responsibility to listen respectfully and treat others with kindness. We had a class discussion about other examples of 'responsibilities' children have at school, and at home. We particularly focused on the importance of cleaning up at school! Please feel free to talk with your child at home about 'responsibilities' because I'm sure they can think of a lot of other ideas too.

The students wrote about their weekends in their journals. They paid tribute to the Junie B. Jones book we're reading (The Silly, Smelly Bus), by coming up with two adjectives to describe their weekend. For example, a student could start off by writing: "On the fun, exciting weekend, I..." or "On the bright, sunny weekend, I..."

Lately we've been focusing less on the amount of writing, and more on the quality of the writing. I usually set a timer for about 20 minutes and tell students that they cannot be 'done' their writing until the timer goes off. I encourage them to find new ways to enhance their work, whether it be through adding more sentences, drawing a colourful picture, or editing for neatness and correct spelling.

In Math, the students learned how to solve addition problems using a ruler as a 'number line'. Rulers are a great tool for addition and subtraction problems involving numbers up to 30. When solving a problem like "14 + 7 = ", students can simply put their finger on '14', and then use the ruler to help them count up 7 more times. If you want to try this activity at home, here are a few problems you could try:

23 + 4 =

12 + 7 =

18 + 5 =

10 + 7 =

27 + 2 =

3 + 15 =

I'm sure you get the idea!

We spent most of the afternoon doing Daily 5. I have officially organized the "Read to Teacher" station so I had a great time reading with small groups of students today. The students enjoyed the new "Literacy Games" station too. 

We practiced spelling at the end of the day and watched the videos I posted previously.

I asked the students to draw arrows to show which letter the "Bossy E" affected in each word. For example, in the word "Cake", the bossy e makes the a say its name.

And that was our day! If you have any questions please let me know. :)

Zac