Dec. 17

 Hello everyone!

Happy Winter Break! We had a very busy day today. 

We were working on finishing up our community maps before and after our Pillars of Care assembly. We used our community checklist to make sure our community map had everything a community needs to be successful and then handed them in. 

We had our assembly and handed out our awards. We were missing quite a few friends today, so some winners will have to get their awards after the break! At the end of the assembly we sang a few familiar holiday songs together as a school.

After the assembly we filled in our calendar and did some skip counting practice. Then, we got to work on our art project! Yesterday, we had used a tracer to draw a mitten on a piece of watercolour paper. We read a story called "The Mitten Tree" about a lady who knits brand new mittens with different colours and designs, and hangs then on an old oak tree for kids to use when they have no mittens, or have lost theirs. We decided to design our own mitten for the mitten tree. 

Today, we started by designing our mitten using a pencil. Once we were happy with our design, we used oil pastels to colour in our design and outline our mitten. 

We took a break to have snack and a quick movement break before learning about watercolour paints. Ms. Byrne demonstrated how to use them under our document camera. She showed us how to add water to the paint to get it working, and how to do a "colour wash" over our mitten. It was so cool how the paint didn't colour the oil pastel on her picture! We did some finishing touches on our mittens and then we took turns visiting a painting station to colour wash our mittens. Luckily, watercolour paints dry quickly and we were able to bring them home! Here are some examples of our finished mittens:

We think they would look great on the mitten tree!

We took some time at the end of the day to clean out our desk trays and bring home any stray drawings or colouring sheets that we'd been working on at lunchtime. Once our desks were tidied and our painting all cleaned up, it was time to get ready for home!

We hope everyone has a safe, relaxing, and happy holiday. School resumes on Tuesday, Jan. 4th. We will see you then!

Have a great day!

-Ms. Byrne

Dec. 15

 

Hello everyone,

It was another cold day today! So, we got to come inside a little early and we watched a short Letter Blocks video about letter e while we waited for school to start. 

During our morning meeting, we learned about the Winter Solstice, which is next week. We learned that it is the shortest day and longest night of the year. Every day after today gets longer until it turns to Spring! Indigenous people recognize this time as a period of rest for plants and animals. They often celebrate this day with ceremony's or personal traditions as it marks the eventual return of longer days, warmer weather, and is a time to reflect on the sun's importance in our lives. 

We filled in our calendar and took some time to practice our number pairs of 10. We practiced them with a song and by modelling pairs of 10 using our fingers. 

Next, we practiced our Wow Words using Wikki Stix - they're colourful sticks that you can build, bend, and use again and again! We had lots of fun creating each letter out of our sticks. Here are some photos of our colourful letters:

 

We had planned to use our words in our journal, but we needed some extra practice of our carolling song for the afternoon assembly so we decided to use this time to practice our song several times to get it just right! Then we had snack and indoor recess. 

We had two rounds of literacy centers before lunch. 

After lunch we had mindfulness and practiced our letter sounds. We practiced making some more CVC words on our whiteboards today using e as the vowel (ex: bed, red, ten, jet, wet). 

Yesterday, we started creating our community maps. We went through our community checklist of important places, then we wrote our community name - Beddington Heights. We started by adding what we thought were the most important things - a grocery store, a school, a houses, etc. Today, we added labels to what we had already drawn, and added extra community places that we think make our community a great place to live!

We did indoor recess and P.E. in our classroom because the carolling assembly was scheduled during our usual P.E. time. We performed Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer during the carolling assembly! It has lots of words, but we did a great job!

Student Shoutouts!

Jawad - rushed to help when someone dropped part of their snack!

Finn - has been so responsible with his sweeping job this week, grabbing the broom and working to sweep the whole class before Ms. Byrne even has to ask!

Ramsh - helped Nathan when he lost his dinosaur eraser!

Reminders:

- Our Virtual Concert link (will be watchable starting at Thursday at 5PM):

https://youtu.be/Yo5mXMKpFDE

- Tomorrow (Thursday) is Plaid Day! Wear your favourite plaid shirt, pants, scarf, socks, etc. 

- Friday is a holiday theme day - dress in your favourite holiday sweater, colours, etc. for our Pillars of Care assembly!

- Friday, Dec. 17 is the last day of school before the Winter Holiday. School will resume on Tuesday, Jan. 4.

Have a great evening!

-Ms. Byrne

Dec. 13

 Hello everyone!

We started our day by changing the books in our book boxes. We had a morning meeting where we shared from our weekend and then talked about our word review from Friday. We discussed that the 2 trickiest words were "and" and "the" so we decided to add them to our bonus words list for this week. Our new words are:

1. in

2. go

3. to (this is our red word this week because the o is making an /oo/ sound, even though there's only 1 o!)

4. my

5. like

Bonus words:

1. and

2. the

3. fin

4. tin

5. win

We wrote our words to bring home the list to practice. Thank you for helping us practice last week! We have already gained a lot of confidence in our reading because we can find words we recognize in every book we open!

We filled in our calendar and started working on letter c before Mr. Wiens came for music. He practiced some holiday songs with us to prepare for the assemblies later in the week. He also shared part of our virtual holiday concert video which will be added to his blog on Thursday for us to watch at home!

After music we had snack and recess. We finished up our letter c work just in time to completed our first literacy center before lunch. We saved our second center for after lunch!

We completed our "Making 10" rainbow work that we had started on Friday with our guest teacher. We will be practicing our making 10 number pairs all week in math, as well as completing the final 2 math assessments that we discussed last week. 

We had our second recess, then we took some time to read a book all about community maps. We learned what maps are, what they show, who uses them, etc. We also learned a few new terms: birds-eye view, scale, and legend. Ms. Byrne showed us a big poster of a map. It is nearly empty, it just has some streets! We will each be getting a map tomorrow that we can fill in with the important community places we have been learning about. We will add lots of the things we saw during our virtual community walk of Beddington Heights. We have created a checklist to help us make our community map our best work! We will be sharing pictures of our community maps later in the week. 

Before heading to the gym, we took some time to start up a new routine in our class - Student Shoutouts. We asked Izzy and Serena to help us with our shoutouts today. They each picked a student who was kind or helpful towards them today so that we could add a shoutout on our blog!

Student Shoutouts!

Ava - when another student fell on their way out for recess, Ava stopped everything to help them get up and make it to the playground. How thoughtful!

Jayla - when Jayla was done her making 10 work today, she noticed that another student needed some help. She used her free-time to help that student complete their making 10 equations. Awesome job Jayla!

Reminders:

Theme days - 

Wednesday, Dec. 15 - Pajama Day

Thursday, Dec. 16 - Plaid Day

Friday, Dec. 17 - Ugly Sweater/Winter Wear Day

Friday, Dec. 17 is also the last day of school before the holidays!

It looks like it's going to be a cold week - keep your eye on the temperature as we may have some Blue Dot days coming up! That means students can come directly into the school when they arrive, rather than lining up on the compound. Doors will open at 7:50 in this instance. Whenever possible there will be notice from the office, or available adults on the compound to direct kids to the doors during drop off. 

Have a great evening!

-Ms. Byrne

Dec. 10

 Hello everyone!

We had a guest teacher today so that Ms. Byrne could meet with us one at a time to complete the final math and literacy assessments we mentioned on Monday. 

We started our day with partner reading. We picked books from our "Just Right" book bag and read our books with a partner. Our guest teacher read our morning message. We completed our first word review for this week's Wow Word! It was a bit tricky, but we got through it! Many of us found the words "and" and "the" challenging. We will review those words next week to make sure we know them really well before moving on. We will also get our new word set on Monday!

We filled in our calendar and did some skip counting practice on a 100s chart. Then, it was time to do literacy centers. We got to choose our centers today! Our guest teacher ran our reading groups. 

Mr. Wien's came to do music with us and practiced a song for next week's assembly! 

After music, we had snack and then did a math activity about ways to make 10. We used a visual of a rainbow to help us match up numbers to make 10. We started creating equations to match! We will continue this activity next week. 

We went to the gym and played a hockey game together. 

We cleaned up and got ready for home.

Reminders:

Theme Days - 

Wednesday, Dec. 15 - Pajama Day

Thursday, Dec. 16 - Plaid Day

Friday, Dec. 17 - Ugly Sweater/Winter Wear Day

Have a great weekend!

- Ms. Byrne

Dec. 8 - New Spirit Days added!

 Hello everyone!

We started our day with some reading time and then read our morning message. We completed another math assessment. This one was about comparing numbers. We had to look at two numbers and cross out the number that is bigger. We had to finish as many as we could in 30 seconds! That's not much time. We had fun trying to finish them all though. 

Next, we filled in our calendar and then we interviewed today's star student - Ayun! We learned that Ayun has 1 sister, she likes the colour pink, and her favourite ice cream is bubblegum flavour. We each chose 2 sentences to write about Ayun and drew a picture of her for our star student book. 

After snack and recess we had another round of literacy centers. We have started guided reading in our reading groups with Ms. Byrne. We are so excited to be reading books! Once we have read a book in our group, we get to put the book into our "Just Right" book bag in our desk. Then, we can practice reading the book on our own during our quiet reading time.

Thank you to everyone for practicing our Wow Words at home this week! We've shared lots of ways that we have been practicing at home, and our practice has been really showing when we are doing guided reading and finding our Wow Words in our books!

After lunch, we had mindfulness time and then some Mathletics time. We all worked on a subtraction task - subtracting from 5 on a number line. Once we finished that job, we got to use Live Mathletics to race other kids in addition and subtraction facts. 

We have been talking about community in social studies. We read another book about the important places and people in a community. We took a closer look at a map of Beddington Heights. We started at our school and went for a little virtual walk around the community. We focused a lot on the Beddington Towne Square and noticed lots of different community essentials there (ex: grocery stores, doctor and dentists offices, gas stations, banks, bus stops). We made a list of all the places we noticed. Next week, we will be using this list to help us create a community map that has everything people in a community need. 

Theme Days:

We have decided to add some extra theme days to make next week even more special! 

Wednesday, Dec. 15 - Pajama Day

Thursday, Dec. 16 - Plaid Day

Friday, Dec. 17 - Ugly Sweater/Winter Wear Day

Have a great day!

-Ms. Byrne

Dec. 6

 Hello everyone!

Today we began our Wow Word program. Wow Words are what we call the words we are practicing this week that we can start reading and writing on our own. Typically, these words are common words (sight words) that will help us be able to read and write more independently. If we can recognize these common words by sight, it will help us be able to read sentences, stories, and books fluently (i.e. we read in whole sentences that we can understand, rather than having to sound out each word 1 at a time). 

A letter is in our backpack that describes our Wow Words program and gives some suggestions as to how you can help us practice these words at home. We start out with the easiest/most common words, and then each week the words become more challenging. Each week we will also have bonus words that belong to a word family. If you find that we can read and write the 5 Wow Words for that week already, we can practice the bonus words as well! We wrote our Wow Words for this week on a paper, as well as some bonus words from the "-and" family. We put our word lists in our backpack so we can practice together. Our Wow Words this week are:

Group A:

1. I

2. a

3. it

4. and

5. the 

(the is a "red" word - that means it is not easy to sound out. We learned a trick today to help us practice red words. We put one arm out to the side, then use our other hand to "chop" the letters. Ask us to show you!)

Bonus Words:

1. sand

2. band

3. hand

4. stand

5. land

Group B:

Group B is working on words with the "sh" sound this week. We practiced some words that have sh in the beginning, middle, and end. 

1. shark

2. share

3. shadow

4. sunshine

5. splash

Bonus Words:

1. friendship

2. marshmallow

We filled in our calendar together. It was our 60th day of grade 1 today! We are also pretty excited to see how close our winter break is! After snack and recess we had another round of literacy centers. Our groups have new leaders this week. We are excited to show off our leadership skills during centers!

After lunch and mindfulness time we introduced our last set of letters. We discussed the sounds of j, y, x, q, c, and e. Then, we learned a new word - digraphs. Digraphs is a word for 2 letters that made a new sound when they are together. Today, we learned about the digraphs sh (ship), ch(cheese), and th(that). We practiced the sound for each of these digraphs. Learning these sounds will help us be able to sound out bigger words!

During math we practiced addition. We were "counting on" using pictures. One example of our counting on practice is below. Let's try to solve this problem together!

Throughout this week some of our math time will be dedicated to completing several math assessments. These assessments have been given to us by the Alberta government to help assess any gaps in learning that have occurred during the pandemic. Depending on the results of these assessments, we may receive additional funding to provide support and help students catch up in any areas where they may be behind. The assessments are tough, but we just need to try our best and do what we can!

In social studies today we began talking about community. We started with a book called "My Family Community" that explained all the ways our family and our community are similar and how our family is connected to our community. We got to share some things about our family like, the ways we help each other, things that we have learned from our family, etc. Then, we looked at a map of the world. We zoomed that map in until we found our neighbourhood - Beddington Heights. We noticed some of the things in our community (ex: grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations, schools). We will continue talking about the important parts of a community throughout the week. 

Reminders:

- With the cold weather having arrived, a friendly reminder to dress in weather appropriate clothes each day. Also, please practice getting our Winter clothes on together so that we are able to get ready as independently as possible. We end up missing a lot of our recess time if Ms. Byrne has to zip up 26 coats!

Have a great evening!

-Ms. Byrne

Dec. 3

 Hello everyone,

We have been continuing our study of CVC words. Sometimes, when we try sounding out a word 1 sound at a time, it can be hard to figure out the word. Yesterday, Ms. Byrne showed us a visual that can help us sound out new CVC words effectively. It is a slide! We put some words on the slide (example below) and used it to help us "slide" the sounds together. We slide our finger down the slide while making the sounds. This helps us connect the vowel sound to the ending consonant. Ask us to show you how to sound out the word below! You can use a simple slide like this one to practice reading any CVC word.

Here is a blank slide if you would like to practice some words together! We have a chart in our classroom that lists the vowels and consonants 

Today, we sat with a partner and searched for CVC words in our new library books. We sounded the words out with our partners and then shared the words at the end of our reading time. We were able to find lots of words we could read!

We did our final review of this set of letter sounds. We will be starting our final set next week! 

In math, we assessed our understanding of 2-digit numbers. Ms. Byrne would say a number (ex: 16) and we had to show that we could write it with the digits in the correct order. When there was a mistake (ex: if we accidentally wrote 61), we would stop and talk about that number. We would repeat the name, break it apart (ex: 16 means 10 and 6), and see if we could figure out how to fix it. 

We completed a round of literacy centres today where we got to choose which centre we went to! Our reading groups were working on reading a book together by sounding out the CVC words and using the pictures to give them clues. 

There was a mix-up in the P.E. schedule, so we got to visit the other half of the gym and played some tag games today. We will get back to practicing our hockey skills next week!

Before getting ready for home, we read another chapter of our My Weird School book. We're halfway through the second book!

Next Week: On Monday we will be starting our sight word program. A letter will be coming home to explain the program. Our weekly words will be posted on the blog each Monday for you to practice at home as well.

Have a great weekend!

-Ms. Byrne

Dec 1

 Hello everyone,

Today, we practiced CVC words. We learned that CVC words have a consonant, a vowel, and then another consonant. Words like: cat, dog, bug, and rip are CVC words. With a partner, we used a pop-it to help us sound out some CVC words. We set up a row of 3 bubbles on the pop-it, then Ms. Byrne showed us a picture. We had to pop a bubble for each sound while we stretched out the word, then write the sounds that we hear. We are getting really good at spelling!

We had music with Mr. Wiens and then filled in our calendar and did some skip counting practice. After recess we did another round of literacy centres. The reading groups that worked with Ms. Byrne today were learning about the king E, or bossy E. King E makes other vowels say their name. For example: turning bit into bite, or cut into cute. We practiced reading lots of king E words during reading groups today. 

After lunch, we went through our letter sounds and then completed a word ladder. The last word in our word ladder today was a king E word! This gave our reading groups the chance to explain the king E rule to the rest of the class. The word was: j-o-k-e. If we're reading a book together this evening, see if we can find any king E words! You might even find a few in this blog post! Try reading the word while covering the king E, then with the king E to see how the word changes.

During math, we worked on the number 12. We made 12 using blocks, showed it on a 10-frame, and talked about why the 1 comes before the 2. We came up with a list of other ways to show 12 and then got to work on our printing book page. 

At the very end of our second recess, we got held up by a fire drill! We did really well during the drill, but it was pretty wet outside. Luckily, we were all in our outdoor clothes already! By the time we came back inside, it was almost time to go to the gym, so we finished up our printing book work, then played a quick rhyming game together. 

In gym we have been learning how to use hockey sticks. We practiced controlling a tennis ball with our sticks and today we were playing a game called "Pirate Treasure" where some people are pirates who are trying to steal our gold (tennis ball) for their treasure chest. We had lots of fun!

Have a great evening!

-Ms. Byrne