Wednesday, November 1

 Hi parents,

We had a great day today. The students were a good level of tired from halloween, where they had just enough energy to do their work but weren't overly cranky.

In the morning, the students received their Healthy Living School journals. These journals were given to us courtesy of Open Minds, which is the organization responsible for an awesome field trip that we're doing in June. The Field Trip will involve a lot of journaling, note-taking, and sketching, so they've asked that the students start getting into it well beforehand.

Today they sketched and wrote their spelling words.

We did Daily LA in the morning, and again in the afternoon. The class seemed to really enjoy the extra literacy time.

In math, we revisited subtraction with regrouping. They're definitely starting to get the hang of it, and thanks to the Golden Beads, I think they actually understand 'regrouping' too. Once they understand the process, we start focusing on the classic subtraction algorithm, and other mental math strategies, to make sure the students all know efficient ways to solve subtraction problems anytime, anywhere.

Have a nice night,

Zac

Tuesday, October 31

 Hi parents,

We had a fun day today of course!

In the morning, we learned about Tim Burton, and discussed the meaning of 'gothic fantasy' art. We looked at many iconic Tim Burton characters and looked for shared traits. Then, the students created their own Tim Burton-inspired self portraits. They look so awesome.

We did an adjective writing challenge, in which the students had to write three adjectives to describe each of their classmates costumes.

We had Music in the afternoon, as well as the Halloween parade. Sorry we went through the gym so fast! I don't know how that always happened, we even practiced going through slowly in the morning, but somehow we ended up tailgating Ms. Adamson's class anyway....

At the end of the day, we had our 'Halloween Party' - outside! How many opportunities in life do you get to build snowmen in Halloween costumes?

Tomorrow is PAJAMA DAY! 

Have a nice night, and Happy Halloween!

Zac

Monday, October 30

 Hi parents,

We had a good day today, maybe a bit less productive than I would've hoped, but I think that's just the pre-Halloween energy.

In the morning, the class wrote in their journals. They had the option to write about their weekend, their halloween costume, or their favourite halloween tradition.

In math, we've continued to learn about regrouping, but now we're moving into subtraction. Using regrouping in subtraction is one of the hardest, if not the hardest thing students learn in math until Grade 5. That being said, I think all our work around place value has helped students feel more comfortable. It's kind of the opposite of addition regrouping, where the objective is to exchange ones for tens. With subtraction, we exchange a group of ten for 10 ones. 

The golden beads make it make sense.

In the afternoon, we did Daily LA, and then we learned a bit about the history of Halloween from a funny youtube video. 

Tomorrow is Halloween!

Please see the image below for information. We've got a lot of fun, yet shockingly educational things planned, and we hope you can make it to the school for the Halloween Parade at 1:00pm!

Have a nice night,

Zac

Spelling Words (Week of Halloween)

 Spelling List A (October 29 – November 3)

grim	fog	house	scary	owl
mask	bats	fangs	crow	goblin

 

Spelling List B (October 29 – November 3)

alien	fright	graveyard	haunt	howling
midnight	monster	costume	spirit	tomb

 

Spelling List C (October 29 – November 3)

wicked	vampire	dreadful	cauldron	ghoulish
otherworldly	phantom	shadow	warlock	zombie

Looking forward to seeing some of these words in our upcoming Halloween-themed writing tasks!

Friday, October 27

 Hi parents,

Today was a great way to wrap up our week. The students had a lot of time to finish up their writing, art, and 'plant fashion' work. 

Our focus was editing. The students had a full 35 minutes to edit and revise their paragraphs. They read their work aloud, and listened to their peers reading it aloud too, and tried to areas for revision. They also scanned for spelling mistakes, capitalization issues, and punctuation problems.

Some students used this time really well. Others decided it was perfect already and got a bit silly. I'm not going to fault anyone for that, because again, we haven't really learned effective editing and revision strategies yet, so I'm not expecting them to all be experts! That's what we'll be doing over the next few weeks.

We went outside to play kickball. It was a blast. It's a very different game in the snow. We'll be going outside for gym every Friday, unless it's a blue day, so please make sure your child has gloves and boots. Snowpants are always a plus too.

Stay tuned for next week's spelling words, and have a nice weekend!

Zac

Thursday, October 26

 Hi parents,

We had another great day today. This has been such a fun year. :)

In the morning, students had more time to work on their earth paragraph writing. Most students are finished or almost finished. It's quite interesting to see how the paragraphs are turning out, especially since we haven't explicitly learned about paragraph writing yet. This task will serve as a great starting point so I can see what I need to teach more, and what they've already got figured out.

Students who finished early got to work on halloween-themed bonus writing.

In Science, we worked on the "Plant Fashion" task, which is always fun. It's a miniature 'interdisciplinary' project that incorporates math, science, and art elements, and even a little bit of French. We had an awesome class discussion about how clothing can be a fun way to express yourself too. 

In the afternoon, we did Daily LA, Music, Mindfulness, and Printing / Cursive.

Have a nice night! 

Here are our Halloween expectations once again.

Veteran Essential Items Drive

 

Wednesday, October 25

 Hi parents,

We had another great day today. The students worked so hard on their paragraphs this morning. I'm really proud of all of them. Last year, we started getting serious about paragraph writing in January, so for the students to be able to take on a writing task like this in October is really awesome. 

Based on what I've seen, the biggest area for growth is going to be grammar. I've seen a lot of issues with tenses and plurals (for example: "The mountains is beautiful", or "the earth is forming millions of years ago")

It's tricky for kids to fix errors like that because even when they read their writing aloud, they don't necessarily hear anything wrong with it. I'm hoping that going over some example / non-example paragraphs as a class will help them hear the difference.

In continuing with our exploration of plants, we read a book about fashion. We talked about how many fabrics come from plants. Tomorrow, the students will be designing their own plant-fashion outfits. We did this activity last year too - it's probably one of my favourites of all time. 

We ended our day with Daily LA, Art, and printing / cursive practice. I told the students the story of "The Big Toe". It's a spooky one.

BLOG HOMEWORK: Write a Topic Sentence for this paragraph. (2 points)

_____________________[insert topic sentence here]_______________________

It is an awesome way to express yourself. You can paint landscapes, people, animals, or even things around the house. Some art is very unusual looking. It makes people wonder about what it could be showing. A world without art would be a very boring place.

Have a nice night!

Zac

Tuesday, October 24

 Hi parents,

We had a much better day today. In the morning, students worked on phase 2 of their paragraph planning task. We studied the "paragraph sandwich" analogy. Just as a sandwich is made complete by two buns, a paragraph needs a topic sentence, and a concluding sentence. The cheese, lettuce, bacon, etc. are the details. We talked about how its important to start a paragraph by introducing the big idea, before moving into the more specific details. 

The students did an awesome job filling in their paragraph sandwich graphic organizers. Tomorrow we'll start writing them officially.

In math, the students worked on addition worksheets while I did individual golden bead lessons. They've got the hang of it for the most part. Next week we'll move on toe subtraction regrouping, which is unfortunately much, much harder.

We played pillow polo in gym, which is a fun game that is similar to floor hockey, but with soft q-tip looking sticks. 

In the afternoon, we had Daily LA and music, and the students worked on their Art Card artwork.

Have a nice night,

Zac

Monday, October 23

 Hi parents,

We had an okay day today. There was a lot of chatting and off-task behaviour sadly, and so even though the students were able to get through all the work, it probably could've been better if they'd used their time more effectively.

In the morning, we worked on our good copies for our Jason Carter-inspired artwork. This part of the day actually did go pretty well, and the artwork is coming along nicely.

Our next activity involved reading through articles about Earth, and making jot notes. We're going to do a fairly big paragraph writing task later in the week, on the topic of Earth, so this activity was mostly intended to just get the gears turning. We'll follow up with some planning time tomorrow, which I hope the students take advantage of, because today's work was just okay.

In the afternoon, we did some more work in Science, and learned about Carrots. The students created venn diagrams to compare carrots with pumpkins. This was pretty fun because there are actually a lot of pretty interesting similarities and differences. We learned that pumpkins are 'fruits' and carrots are vegetables, and also that when you eat a carrot, you're eating the root of the plant.

We ended our day with spelling practice. 

Have a nice night!

Zac 

Spelling Words (Week of October 22)

 Spelling List A (October 20 – 27)

cozy	pony	any	happy	tidy
lazy	very	busy	copy	many

 

Spelling List B (October 20 – 27)

rarely	family	city	fancy	angry
sorry	ready	funny	diary	luxury

 

Spelling List C (October 20 – 27)

spooky	cemetery	guilty	mummy	ghostly
terribly	misery	mystery	journey	symmetry

The theme this week is the -y ending. List C has some awesome vocabulary words for writing scary stories.

Good luck!