Musical Instrument due Feb. 8

 In a backpack near you there is a little homework project for science.  Little learners are to build a musical instrument that demonstrates a variety of pitches and has a loudness control.  Feel free to look on the internet with your learner to source ideas.  Please use materials you already have at home - this is not intended to be a shopping project.  Instruments are due at school Feb 8, 2022.

We have been brainstorming ways to tell someone new to the Great White North about snow.  We thought about all the different ways to finish the sentence, snow is...  We came up with snow is sparkly, snow is fluffy, snow is fun, snow is deep.  Then we read, A Thing Called Snow!  It changed how we described snow because we learned about similes.  Snow is sparkly like your eyes.  Snow is fluffy like your tail.  So now that we all know about similes we went back to the last story we were working on and dropped in a simile to make our story interesting for our reader.

Congratulations to our January pillars of care winners who were voted in by their peers:

Learning - Numan

Place - Sarah

Others - Yusef

Self - Mateo 

Wisdom - Karim

No school Monday

Decomposing Tens

 We have been working with the sentence, "There (are/aren't) enough ones to subtract ____ ones.  You (don't have to/have to) decompose a ten." to determine if students are understanding the concept of borrowing.  We are working with base ten blocks to physically manipulate numbers and take them apart if necessary.  Students must be able to share their thinking and describe what they are doing with numbers and this sentence will be beneficial.

Discussion this afternoon was around jobs that the mama and the papa do while we are at school.  This led us into goods and services.  We have determined that a good is something that we can see and feel and a service is something done by someone else.  Now that we have determined what the words mean we will look at goods and services in Tunisia, Ukraine, Peru and India.

Our mentor text this week is, "Henry's Freedom Box" by Ellen Levine.  We have used the story to ask questions before during and after reading, next we will use it for character traits.  It is the true story of Henry Brown who mails himself to Philadelphia and freedom from slavery.  Our discussion of slavery and the treatment of other people will carry on as we move into Black History Month.

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Goggle Classroom

In the fall I sent home a set of passwords etc. to access our Goggle classroom, Mathletics and Raz-kids.  Please practise each one of those sites to ensure you can access them in case we need to go online with no notice.  Drop me an email if you need help.

We've been reading poetry on Wednesdays - talking about how it looks, how it sounds, how it makes us feel etc.  Children have been reading poetry with a partner and trying out some different styles and different authors.  Ask your little learner if they have a favorite.

We are using words we know - all, tell, pill, roll, pull to decode and spell new words and asking ourselves, does that look right?  Not only are we using all the vowels but also the double l ending.  We are looking at the words and also listening to new words in this activity.

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Antigen tests

 In a backpack near you is a box of COVID-19 Antigen tests with instructions.  Masks will be coming in another delivery.

Rounding to the nearest 10 was our objective in math today.  We looked at a number line from 1 - 100 that was coloured just for rounding purposes.  We looked at how many jumps was between numbers so we could decide if a number would round up or round down to the nearest 10.  We built a number line from red cups that were labelled from 10 - 100 and played Pick-A-Stick - everyone had craft sticks with numbers on them to place in a cup.  Then we followed clues in the classroom to round numbers.  We should all be rounding to 10 experts at this point!

We are still working on our walking stories about our favorite toy.  Some great beginnings have been practised and we discussed the difference between an anchor line and robot writing.  Authors were super busy today.

Vibrations create sound.  Vibrations travel on molecules in the air.  When the molecules reach our ear the eardrum begins to vibrate.  Our science discoveries today.  Sound maps were created simply by making a map of where the sounds were coming from in our classroom.  We noticed that a lot of sound comes in our doorway and from the furnace!

We were so busy for a Monday!

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Sound and Hearing

 We conducted our first science experiment of our new unit, Sound and Hearing today.  We found out that sound is caused by vibrations.  Vibrations move through the air as waves.  We also found out that as people get older they lose the ability to hear high frequency sounds.  Ask your little learner about the experiment we did and all the sounds Mrs. Anderson could not hear that they could!

After listening to a couple poems we compared poetry to story - we focused today on what a poem looks like and started an anchor chart all about what we are discovering about poetry.  We also had time for everyone to dig into a poetry book and do some independent reading.

We noticed today that the houses in Tunisia all had flat roofs - we then wondered why the houses in Calgary all have a pitched roof and what that says about the way homes are designed in different countries.

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Bear is a Bear

 Welcome back to school!  We were all so excited to be back together again.  

Our mentor text this week for writing is 'Bear is a Bear', the simple story of a favourite toy and the girl who grows up loving him.  We talked about our favourite toys and the anchor line that appears over and over in the story, "Bear is a bear full of love."  Writers will plan their own story about a favourite toy and write this week using an anchor line.  Anchor lines help make the story interesting for our readers.

In math we were drawing and writing about 3-D objects in our math journals so we have the information we need to do some comparing.

Our work around questioning continues - today we were asking questions about the story, "The Wednesday Surprise."  Good readers ask questions before, during and after reading.  Good questions help us to think beyond the story and are not necessarily answered in the book.  We found out that most of our questions were pretty quick, and right there in the story.  We will aim tomorrow for questions that are deeper and thicker and not answered right there on the page.

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