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