October 19-23, 2020

 Hello Families,

Just a few reminders...  

-Halloween  - students can wear costume all day Thursday Oct. 29 -  check the blog post from last week.

-No school on Friday Oct. 30

-Photo retakes are Nov. 3 - please email me if you would like your child to have re-takes

This week we finished our letter review and began focusing on the vowel sounds. So far we have discussed long and short E and A sounds. My hope is that students in grade 1 will learn that vowels can make different sounds, and students in grade 2 will begin to recognize the vowel pairs that make these sounds. Here is a video that I really like for vowels. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TjcT7Gto3U

We completed our tree Art and wrote personal thank you's to the trees. The students brainstormed creative and thoughtful ways we are thankful for the trees.

We used our prior knowledge from what we learned about patterns to create some colorful art.

We introduced a new math game called making tens...

We used the interactive hundreds board to solve the following riddles...

We learned about contemporary artist Yayo Kusami. Her story was the inspiration behind our pumpkin art.

I will take more photos and post all of the student work once we have their beautiful art displayed.

Safe Play Outside

This week we also had to have an important conversation about recess expectations. We are finding that some students in our cohort (Our class, Ms. Brown's class and Ms. Midgley's class) are not playing safely during recess time. There is a lot of hands-on, unsafe and unkind play happening. I felt that our conversation as a class went really well and students had a really good understanding of what is expected of them during recess time. Please take some time this weekend to check-in with your child about the types of games they are playing at recess.

(During Physical education games are taught that can be played during recess) Ms. Brown, Ms. Midgely and I have decided that we need to be very consistent and firm in our consequences for not following these expectations. If students are being unsafe and unkind during recess time, they will have to walk with the supervisor during their recess instead of choosing their own activities. During this time, they will discuss appropriate and inappropriate school play, and find examples of students playing safely in the schoolyard. Depending on the severity of the situation, students may spend up to a week walking with the supervisor. Hands-on and violent behaviour cannot be tolerated at school, especially given the Covid rules and routines students have been asked to follow. Thank you in advance for your support with this important matter!

Have a nice weekend.