Oct. 27

 Hello everyone,

We have been practicing using onset and rime to break words into chunks. We have practiced with some of our classmates names (ex: M-icah) and played a game where we take away the onset of someone's name and replace it with a new letter to see what their "new name" is (ex: T-icah, or V-icah). We take turns trying to read the new names. It is so cool to see how much our reading has grown already!

Today we also focused on the -at word family. Words in that family all have -at as their rime. We read through our -at family poem together and then we each got a highlighter to see if we could find all of the   -at family words in the poem and highlight them. We made a house poster on our SmartBoard and added all of the -at family words we could think of to the house. We split them into their onset and rime and practiced reading them. 

Later in the day we introduced a new family -og. We read an -og family poem and practiced splitting the -og words into their onset and rime.

We learned about 3 types of writing today. When we are first writing we start at level 1 - scribble writing. That's where we use scribbles, random letters, or pictures to help share our ideas and stories. When we scribble write it usually means only the person who wrote the idea can read it. Once we start learning letter sounds like we are, we can begin to move onto level 2, bubblegum writing. This is where we stretch out a word to help us write all of the sounds that we hear (ex: today we chose the word "airplane" to stretch out. When we stretched it long we were able to hear the sounds "arplan"). Using bubblegum writing, we can write some  or most of the letters in the word. We can also use any sight words that we know to help write a sentence (ex: "I see an arplan."). This means that now I can read my story, my teacher can probably read my story, moms and dads could read my story, and maybe some other people. When we know all the letter sounds, sight words, vowel rules, etc. then we can write using the final level - book writing. Lots of times we might mix book writing and bubblegum writing (ex: using sight words and bubblegum writing to make a sentence). Bubblegum writing is about using the sounds that we know to help us share our ideas and get used to writing. It can be hard not to feel stuck because we want to spell things perfectly, but taking risks is an important part of learning! We practiced bubblegum writing by writing 1 sentence on our whiteboards with a bubblegum word. 

In math, we practiced using the words sides and vertices to describe shapes. We counted the sides and vertices of lots of different shapes and filled in a chart to show how many sides and vertices each shape had. We are going to continue practicing with these words tomorrow!

We reviewed everything we have learned about our sense of smell so far. We watched a quick video that showed a diagram of our nose. We followed air as it went through the nostrils, to special receptors that help us to smell things. Those receptors send messages to our brain, and then our brain works to figure out what the smell is, if it is safe, etc. Today we talked about how to keep our nose safe (don't put anything inside it!). We also talked about a second important job that our nose does - helping our sense of taste! We learned that our senses of smell and taste work together to help us taste our favourite foods. That's why foods taste differently when we have a stuffy nose. 

Reminders:

Costume Day Friday

·       Students are permitted to wear their costume

·       All costume props must be left AT HOME including masks, wands, swords etc.  All students will still be required to wear their Covid-19 mask.

·       The school is closed on the weekend so if any costume items are forgotten at school they will not be accessible until Halloween is over.

Have a great day!

-Ms. Byrne

Oct. 25

 Hello everyone!

We started our day by switching out the books in our book boxes. We had a quick class meeting to share some things from our weekend. We filled in our calendar and practiced counting to 100 by 1s and 10s. 

Next, we had music. Mr. Wiens was away today, so we had a guest teacher that taught us how to use chopsticks as mini drumsticks! We learned some new songs and practiced playing them on our new drumsticks. 

We had a new star student today and completed our interview of them before ate snack. After recess, we worked on our Star Student pages. We were working so hard to do our best that we needed a little extra time after lunch to complete our pages. 

Then, we reviewed the sounds of our first letter set. We talked about 2 new words - onset and rime. The onset is the first sound in a word (everything before the vowel). The rime is the rest of the word (from the vowel onward. For example: in the word sat, /s/ is the onset, /at/ is the rime. We practiced breaking some 3 letter words into their onset and rime. Then, we read a poem together that had lots of words that had the same rime -at. We will focus on this poem a little more tomorrow and learn more about the -at word family.

In math, we worked on the number 9. We practiced the number and word 9 in our printing books. We showed 9 on a ten frame, and then chose 1 other way to show 9. 

After our second recess we completed our last step of our Braille practice. We got to bring them home today! Then, we looked at the next sense from our 5 senses book - smell! We filled in a sentence in our book and brainstormed things that have a strong smell. We drew some pictures in our book of things that we like to smell. 

During P.E. we practiced using scoops and bean bags to toss in a forward direction. We took turns tossing our beanbag into a hula hoop for aiming practice.

Reminders:

Costume Day Friday

·       Students are permitted to wear their costume

·       All costume props must be left AT HOME including masks, wands, swords etc.  All students will still be required to wear their Covid-19 mask.

·       The school is closed on the weekend so if any costume items are forgotten at school they will not be accessible until Halloween is over.

Have a great day!

-Ms. Byrne

Oct. 22

 Hello everyone!

We are excited to tell you that we finished our first set of letters. They are: p, b, t, d, f, v, k, g, a, o. We have completed these letters in our printing book and practice the sounds every day. We have even started spelling words using these letters on our whiteboards! This week we have also been practicing reading the words: the, I, a, see, can. We have been finding these words in our morning message, and in books that we read together. These words are in lots of books! They are important for us to remember because they will help us read full sentences and stories more fluently. We also used these words to write a journal entry yesterday. We each wrote "I see a ______." and filled in the blank with a word of our own! Some of us used words we know how to spell already like cat, others used words we found on our name tags like circle or square, and some of us tried to sound out another word using its sounds. We used these journal entries to practice writing all of our words on the line, using our new popsicle stick tool to add spaces, and writing with lowercase letters. Our journals improved so much! Check out some before and after pictures below. These journals are only a week apart! (don't worry - Ms. Byrne always asks permission to share our work. We look at the before, then the after and celebrate how much we are growing together!):

Before: Lots of great ideas here! We could fix some of the floating letters, and keep the words in one sentence together so that it is easy to read.

After: Neat and tidy! Letters on the line, nice spaces, and our sentences together. This time, our friend even spelled "camper" by himself by stretching out the sounds and writing the letters he could hear. We have to be brave and take risks to do our best learning!

Before: Another awesome idea, and all the letters are on the line nicely. We need to add spaces between words and practice using lowercase letters throughout our sentence.

Wow! Look at those neat lowercase letters. The spaces make it easy to read her ideas, and she also sounded out "block" with just a little help from Ms. Byrne.

Today we finished our shape scavenger hunt and added our chart to our math books. We were able to find lots of examples of circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles in our classroom. See how many we can find at home!

During our morning meeting today we talked about the story of Chanie Wenjack. Our last blog post explains his story as well. We talked about how Chanie was a student at residential school who really missed his family. He decided to sneak away from the school to try and walk back to his home. It was a very far walk - over 600km! And it was very cold outside. Unfortunately, Chanie passed away before he was able to make it home. We used our P.E. time today to complete a "Walk for Wenjack." We added together the distance we walked as a class and it added up to 38.4km! We talked about how it is important to remember the children who went to residential school, and let them know that we would never want that to happen to them or any other people again. 

Our last job of the day was to complete our Braille project. We reviewed how Braille works and we each got to look at an actual book with Braille writing! We watched a video of a young girl reading Braille as well and she helped show us how it worked. We each got a Braille alphabet - it kind of looked like a secret code! We got to work finding the "code" to match each letter of our name. Once we had coloured in the dots we needed, we glued split peas to the coloured dots to create a raised effect. We set them all out to let the glue dry, but we will be bringing our projects home next week to share! 

Reminders:

- Friday, Oct. 29 - Students will be allowed to wear a costume to school on this day if they would like. As always, no toy weapons of any kind. Students will still be required to wear a face mask that covers their nose and mouth. Full face masks that are a part of a costume are not allowed. 

Have a great weekend!

-Ms. Byrne

Oct. 20

 Hello everyone!

We started our day by practicing tracking the words to our 5 Little Pumpkins poem. Tracking means pointing to the words with our finger as we are reading them. Tracking is a helpful strategy when we are first learning to read because it helps us start to distinguish where words begin and end! It can be tricky when the words have more than 1 syllable, so we can practice at home when we read books together too!

Next, we talked about visualization again. We discussed how visualization is a tool that helps us understand a story that we have heard or that we are reading. When we create a picture in our brains as we are reading it can help us make connections and understand details. We use picture words from a story or poem to help us. For example, in our 5 Little Pumpkins poem, we used the words one, pumpkin, and smiling to know how to draw the matching picture. Today, we each got a small postcard sized paper. Ms. Byrne read us a few descriptive sentences while we closed our eyes and tried to draw the picture in our brains. Then, she read us the passage again and we started to draw the picture on our paper. She read it to us again while we were drawing, and 1 last time at the end for us to make sure our picture included every detail that we heard. Take a look at the description, and then some of our pictures below:

Don't we have great artists in our class? We were able to find lots of the picture words in that passage to add to our drawings. We are going to continue practicing this strategy with poems and stories that we read. We can try drawing a picture at home to match a favourite story as well!

We completed another star student for our class book today. We practiced writing our sentences on the line, with spaces between the words. We each got a popsicle stick with our names on it to use to create spaces between our words. We enjoyed using them to improve our writing!

In math, we have started talking about 2D shapes. We have been practicing naming different 2D shapes and talking about the similarities and differences between them. We went on a scavenger hunt around our classroom to search for circles in real life. We were able to find so many! We will continue our scavenger hunt with different shapes throughout this week. We also had the iPads booked to try out Mathletics today, but the iPads were being grumpy and most of them wouldn't let us use the app! We took our passwords home to try it out instead, and we used the iPads to read more books on Raz-Kids, or test out our letter recognition playing Letter School. Sometimes technology just does not cooperate! Hopefully, the iPads will be fixed for our next turn. 

We have been doing double-duty in Science! We have been practicing drawing Fall trees with lots of branches to create a final Fall art project. We have also been talking about our 5 senses and reviewing everything we have learn about our sense of sight. We started a 5 senses book where we looked at a picture of an eye and talked about the parts: pupil, iris, tear duct, eyelid, and eyelashes. We discussed why each part is important and what they do. On Friday, we will be working on a project to make our names in Braille - a type of writing that people who are blind use to read!

Reminders:

Scholastic Book Orders - A second Scholastic book order flyer was sent home this week. There is no pressure at all to order, but if you choose to order any books or materials from Scholastic you can use our class code: RC174728. Using this code gives our class money to buy new books for our classroom! Thank you to everyone who ordered books in September! Our class received $32 and we were able to purchase 6 new books for our classroom! This month, Ms. Byrne chose to select books by Indigenous authors such as: The Water Walker, This is How I Know, and Awasis and the World Famous Bannock. Once these books are delivered to us, we will read them together to explore some of our current topics through an Indigenous perspective. Again, thank you for helping us build our classroom library!

Picture Day - Our pictures were taken on Tuesday. As soon as the samples arrive at the school, we will be bringing them home for you to see. This usually takes at least a couple of weeks. If you are not happy with this first picture, we will have an opportunity for re-takes later in the year. 

Walking For Wenjack - This week is Secret Path Week. During this week we participate in a Walk For Wenjack. Chanie Wenjack was a young boy who attended residential school. He missed his family so much that he decided to leave his school and try to walk home to be with them. His house was very far away, and it was very cold. Unfortunately, Chanie did not make it. Each year, we walk together as a class to remember Chanie Wenjack and help him finish his long walk. On Friday, we will be walking on the path between our field and St. Bede's School, on the sidewalk that runs along our soccer field, then back down towards the school. This walk is covered in our "Walking Field Trip" letter that was sent home at the beginning of the year. 

Have a great day!

-Ms. Byrne

Oct. 15

 Hello everyone!

Yesterday, we finished up our "I can..." journals. Today, we looked at some of our journal entries and talked about some of the things we could see. We noticed that some of our friends had forgotten to add spaces between their words, or accidentally let their letters float away (not touching the line). We also talked about where capital letters should be (not in the middle of a sentence!). We practiced writing some sentences together to see where the spaces and letters should be. We are going to keep practicing this next week until we are feeling more comfortable writing in our journals independently. 

We practiced letter G yesterday. We only have 1 letter left in our first set - A. Then we will do some review of our first 9 sounds and practice making words with them before we start our second set. 

We finished working on visualizing our 5 Little Pumpkins poem today! We drew a picture for each stanza of the poem. We practiced reading the poem together, then we watched a video of the 5 Little Pumpkins song to see if our pictures were different or the same as the pumpkins in the video. 

Yesterday, we practiced adding numbers using the number lines on our desk. It is a pretty simple strategy! We were able to do several problems on our own. We have been mostly adding and subtracting with 1 so far, but we're ready to start using some bigger numbers!

We had music with Mr. Wiens today and we went to the gym to play some parachute games as well. 

We also reviewed something we did in the very first week of school - writing the numbers to 100! When we first tried, it was very tricky! Today, we were able to write more number, and we fixed some of the numbers that we used to write backwards. It is so cool to see how much we have learned already!

Reminders:

Monday, Oct. 18 - No School - PD Day

Tuesday, Oct. 19 - Picture day

Note from Parent Council:

BHS Parent Council Fundraiser | School Apparel

Beddington Heights Parent Council Association is excited to be working with Calgary Silk Screen Inc (a Calgary Based company) to offer all Beddington Heights Students, Staff and Family members our latest School Swag. Along with your comfortable, quality clothing $5.00 from each item sold will go to our school. Click on the link below to begin shopping, there is no time restriction on when you need to order by. The Campaign will remain open till the end of the 2021/2022 school year. You also have the option on to have your items delivered to your home (for a delivery fee) or you can collect your order at Calgary Silk Screen when your items are ready. Thank you for your continued support of our school. Beddington Heights Parent Council Association CLICK HERE

Have a great weekend! -Ms. Byrne