Jan. 28

 Happy Friday everyone!

We had a busy day today. We quickly switched our Home Reading books because we had a Pillars of Care assembly this morning! We got to hand out our awards for this month and our brave winners said their names loud and clear on camera. It's always fun getting to see the rest of the school during our assemblies! 

We had our snack and then played some tag games in the gym. We came back to class to fill out our calendar and do some skip counting practice. Did you know that today was the 84th day of grade 1? The 100th day is getting close! We heard that the 100th day of grade 1 is a special day, and we can't wait to see what happens!

Yesterday we completed one of our basic facts math assessments and we had 8 people get 100%! We looked at a chart that Ms. Byrne made to show us how much we've grown in math so far this year. Every time we complete a basic facts assessment, Ms. Byrne adds our scores together to get the class score (average). Every single month our class score has gotten higher, and this time it was 88%! We set a goal to get up to 90% next month. 

We completed 2 rounds of literacy centres and then we got back to work on our science posters. We started our posters about Winter yesterday by drawing at least 2 examples of things we learned about animals in Winter. Some of us drew bears sleeping in their caves, birds migrating south, or hares with white fur. Today, we each got a checklist for our poster and we wrote the ideas from our poster into the checklist. If we had completed that part of our drawing, we gave those ideas a big checkmark! Some of us started adding our ideas about plants in the Winter to our posters as well, but we had to pause our work because it was already home time. We'll keep working on our drawings next week!

Reminders:

Monday, Jan 31 - No School - P.D. Day

January 31 - Feb 4 - Report cards will be available online for you to view! You can view your child's report card through your MyCBE account. If you do not have an account already, a letter was sent home in your child's backpack today with instructions of how to set it up!

Have a great weekend!

-Ms. Byrne

Jan. 26

 Hello everyone!

We had lots of Home Reading books to change this morning! Thanks again to everyone who is reading their books together at home and taking the time to fill out the recording page. We've been starting to feel more and more confident choosing more challenging books to take home!

We filled in our calendar and did some counting practice. We also took some time to practice Indigenous words for Winter to add to our Medicine Wheel. We learned that a Cree word for Winter is: pipon. A Blackfoot word that means "It's Winter time," is: Ákaisstoyiiwa. We added them to our Medicine Wheel to match our Fall section.

We read 2 books together this morning called "I can" and "I can be." We took turns volunteering to read a page in front of the whole class! Ms. Byrne noticed that we were looking closely at the words to read the pages, instead of focusing on the pictures. That means we are growing into strong readers! Pointing to each word as we read (print tracking) can be helpful in developing this skill because it helps us to focus on the words that are on the page, making sure we are saying the same number of words (e.g. reading "I can ride my bike." when the words say "I can ride."). It also helps us to notice the first letter/sound of a word we are stuck on. We can practice print tracking at home with our home reading books too! After reading those 2 books together, we took out our journals to write an "I can..." journal. We brainstormed some things that we can do, and then set a goal for everyone to write 3-5 sentences today. We're getting much more confident with our spelling and trying out some words on our own! Take a look at some of our awesome journal work:

Serena wrote "I can read. I can jump. I can play."

Jayla wrote "I can make my bed. I can play the cat game. I can look at my toy. I can make my snowman."

Nathan wrote: "I can play soccer. I can run. I can swim."

Ava wrote: "I can do monkey bars. I can do guitar. I can do hopping. I can do hopscotch. I can do colouring."

After snack and recess, we had some more literacy centre time. Both reading groups today were working on comprehension. That means understanding what we are reading. We were re-reading parts of a story to find information and making predictions about what would happen next in the story. 

We had a guest teacher during our math period. We worked on filling in our addition strategies booklet. Today we reviewed how to add with 0 and 1. Tomorrow, we will be reviewing adding with pictures, and our counting on strategy with dots. 

We practiced our tricky letter sounds, then played a game to review our Wow Words. 

In Science, we read 1 more book about Winter. We discussed that some places do not have weather like ours during the Winter. We talked about why some places have warmer weather than us during the Winter months. Some of us knew about these places, and had even been to them before! We discussed our plans for our Winter picture. We are going to make a checklist to help us make sure we have everything we need in our pictures. We are going to start creating our Winter pictures tomorrow. 

We had P.E. with Ms. Sterne today, and then it was time to go home!

Reminders:

- Monday, Jan. 31st - No School - P.D. Day

- Please remember to use the AHS checklist with your child to check to see if they have any covid symptoms before coming to school. 

Have a great day!

-Ms. Byrne

Jan. 24

 Hello everyone,

We started our morning by switching out our Home Reading books. We completed our Wow Word review. We did well with this week's words! Some of us found the word "can" a bit tricky and mixed up the letters. We talked about how saying the word to ourselves, quietly or in our head, can help us to put the letters in the right order because we know the sounds each letter makes. We got our new Wow Words:

1. for

2. day

3. went

4. play

5. is

Bonus Words (the -ay family):

1. say

2. may

3. way

4. stay

5. away

We had music with Mr. Wiens and then we added our new words to our word rings. If we had left our word rings at home, we wrote the words on the papers and put them into our backpack to add them to our ring when we get home. Please help us to add them to our rings when you can!

We introduced 2 new literacy centres today! We added letter tiles and Wikki Stix. We will use these centres to practice our Wow Words and other sight words. We had fun testing out our new literacy centres. 

After lunch and mindfulness time, we did some practice with the /th/ sound. Many of us have been mixing up the /v/ and /th/ sounds, which is pretty common in grade 1. We practiced how we make those sounds with our mouths (for the /v/ sound we put our top teeth on our bottom lip, for the /th/ sound our tongue goes between our teeth). In words like "the" or "teeth" the /th/ can sound very similar to a /v/ or /f/ sound, so it can be confusing! If you hear us mixing those sounds at home, try to practice the way we say the sounds. Listen to see if we are saying things like "fursday" for Thursday, or "fink" for think. It is common for people to mix these sounds, but practicing it will help us to read and write words with /th/ more confidently!

In math, we started creating a flip book to show the different strategies we are learning for addition. Today, we prepared the book and reviewed the first strategy, which is all about adding with 0. We will add some examples to this page of our flip book tomorrow, and then move on to the next strategy. Our book has 5 different strategies in it for us to review and practice!

We read a book all about plants in the Winter. We watched a quick video that showed us how evergreen trees use their needles to help them store water during the Winter! We made a list of the things we learned about plants in the Winter and added it to our list about animals. We reviewed our list of facts about animals in Winter and then took some time to finish our bear drawing from Friday. 

Reminders:

- This is Family Literacy Week! Click here for a pdf document that includes links from the CBE and the public library for different literacy activities your family can participate in each day this week!

- Monday, Jan. 31 - No School - P.D. Day

Student Shout-Outs:

Hiba - for noticing some garbage on the playground and putting it into the garbage can

Have a great day!

- Ms. Byrne

Jan. 21

 Hello everyone!

We had P.E. right away this morning, which was new for us! We enjoyed getting to go to the gym right away. We've been having lots of fun trying out the gymnastics equipment and moving through the obstacle courses that Mrs. Sterne set up for us! 

Next, we had some partner reading time. We got out our "Just Right" book bags and practiced reading our books to our partners. During this time we also changed our Home Reading books. Thank you for using the E, R, C part of our recording pages to let Ms. Byrne know if our books are too easy or too challenging. We read challenging books during our guided reading sessions, but we want to build more confidence with independent reading so starting out with books that are easier for us is part of our strategy! You might notice our word rings missing from our folders - we decided to keep them in our desks for the week so that they would be there on Monday when we add new words to them. If we have our word rings at home still, please bring them back Monday morning so that we can add our new Wow Words!

We filled in our calendar and did our skip counting practice before having snack. Then, we chose literacy centres and completed 2 rounds of centre time. On Monday we will have some new centres to try out!

Mr. Wiens came to teach us music. Then, we worked on some math. Yesterday, we were learning about the "counting on" strategy. We picked the smallest number in the question, then drew dots beside it to match the number. We pointed to the bigger number, said it's name out loud, then counted on using the dots (ex: in 5+7 - we drew 5 dots, then said 7 and pointing to the dots - 8, 9, 10, 11, 12). Today we did some questions using this strategy together under the document camera, then we tried some on our own. We got to choose between smaller numbers and larger numbers to do our questions. 

We ended our day with some guided drawing. Since we've been learning about Winter and what animals are doing in Winter, we wanted to practice drawing a sleeping bear in his den. We were almost finished our drawings when the fire bell started ringing! It was a little scary, but we got right into our line and headed outside. It was just a practice fire drill, but Mr. Hebert was trying to surprise us to see if we could still follow our fire drill rules. We did a great job! 

When we came back in, it was already time to get ready to go home. We decided to save our bear pictures and finish them on Monday. 

Have a great weekend!

-Ms. Byrne

Jan. 19

 Hello everyone!

Thank you to everyone who has jumped right in to our home reading program! We have been very proud to tell everyone about reading our books with you. Confidence is growing already! Remember, you can return books any day to received new ones. Don't forget to record the book on the recording page in your yellow folder!

We started our day with a morning meet all about: wisdom. Wisdom is our pillar of the month for January, so we wanted to learn more about what it means. We learned that wisdom can have many meanings. It can mean using the things you already know to help you make good choices. It can mean learning from your mistakes. It can mean using the information you see around you to help you learn new things. That's just a few of the ways we can show wisdom! We used our wisdom conversation to talk about the wisdom of Indigenous people. We read a book called "This is How I Know." This book tells the story of a little girl and her grandma walking together. The grandma is sharing her wisdom with the little girl and tells her all the ways she knows that the seasons are changing. The book was written by an Anishinaabe author! We discussed how wisdom is an important part of many Indigenous cultures because they hold a lot of knowledge about plants, animals, and the earth. How to take care of them, where to find food and water, which plants could be used for medicine, etc. Elders are a very important part of many Indigenous cultures because they have a lot of wisdom to share with us. We thought about some ways that we could show wisdom in our classroom and we wrote a journal entry about our own wisdom about how we know it's winter. 

We filled in our calendar and worked on some more word problems together. Yesterday, we were learning about subtracting numbers that are the same. For example, 5-5=0 because if we have 5 cookies, and we eat 5 of them, we would have no cookies left. Today, we practiced some more subtraction from 5 with word problems.

After snack and recess we had a round of literacy centres. We will be changing some of our centres next week to make them more challenging!

After lunch we had our weekly Mathletics times. We worked on a subtraction task before getting to choose our own tasks. 

We had our second recess, then played a quick movement game with our Wow Words and reviewed our set of tricky letter sounds. 

Finally, we read a book about plants in the Winter. Yesterday, we read about animals in the Winter and noted some of the different things they are doing (ex: their fur has changed colour, hibernating, growing a thicker coat). We read our book today and made a list of the things we learned. We're getting ready to create a Winter poster next week to show what we know about Winter. We finished our smaller snowflakes yesterday and added them to our Medicine Wheels as well! 

Have a great evening!

-Ms. Byrne

Jan 17

 Hello everyone!

We were very excited to start our day by getting our Home Reading program up and running. We each received a yellow folder today with our name on it. Inside, there is a letter explaining the program, a recording sheet for us to fill out each night we read, and a page of reading strategies and ideas for us while we're reading together. We each chose a book to add to our folder. If the book we chose is too easy or too challenging, there's a spot for us to add that on our recording sheet to help us choose our next book! We can bring our books back as soon as we are done with them to get new ones. 

Next, we completed our Wow Word review with last week's words. We did great! We got our new words:

1. at

2. on

3. we

4. can

5. you** (our red word for the week)

For our bonus words we used "at" family words:

1. cat

2. hat

3. rat

4. bat

5. that

We added our new Wow Words to our word rings, and then we put our word rings into our Home Reading folder so that we can practice at home. Please keep our word rings with our folders, and make sure to return both on Fridays so that we can add our new words next Monday.

We filled in our calendar and did some counting practice. After snack and recess, we had literacy centres. 

After lunch we reviewed some of our trickiest letter sounds, and then played a game with our new Wow Words. 

During math, we did some review of the difference between addition and subtraction. We completed a basic facts assessment with addition and subtraction up to 5. We are getting more confident with these problems!

We got to go to the playground for our second recess, and then we came back in to work on our snowflake projects. We are making a second, smaller, snowflake to add to our giant medicine wheel. We will be filling in the Winter section of the medicine wheel with these small snowflakes. We talked again about how snowflakes are made and why they look different. Then, we picked out our cool coloured markers and goto to work preparing another coffee filter. We love spraying the filters to make the markers blend together. It's very fun to watch!

Before heading to the gym we got some more things to put into our backpacks. We got a letter and a copy of our emails and passwords to sign in to our Google Classroom in case we have to do online school at any point. We also got a box of rapid Covid tests, and a bag of masks to take home. If you are looking for a way to improve the fit of masks for little ones, this video has a great tip to make the disposable masks fit more snug:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzTAZDsNBe0

Have a great evening!

-Ms. Byrne

Jan. 14

 Hello everyone!

We got to start our day by sharing our "Just Right" book bags with a partner. We took turns reading pages from our books with partners. We're starting to feel more confident with reading each day!

We filled in our calendar and worked on some problem solving strategies! We're learning how to highlight important information in problems. We introduced this topic yesterday and worked on a problem together. Today, we completed another problem as a class, and then we got together with a partner and solved a problem on our whiteboards! We used our fingers, mental math, and counters as different strategies to solve the problem. 

Next, we chose literacy centres and got to work. We love getting to choose our centres on Fridays! We're almost ready to switch our literacy centres to make them more challenging as we've learned so much in these last few months!

We had snack and then got to work on our snowflake project. Yesterday, we coloured onto coffee filters with markers. We chose certain colours called "cool" colours from our marker packages. Cool colours remind us of winter and cold feelings. We chose blues, purples, and pinks. When we finished colouring our filter, we got to spray it with water. We let them dry over night and they turned our beautifully! We loved looking at everyone's snowflake paper. We folded the papers one step at a time and then practiced some tricks to help us cut shapes into our snowflakes. We each designed our snowflake and were amazed when we opened them up - they looked incredible! These snowflakes were our practice copies, so we will be taking them home today. Look for our beautiful work in our backpacks!

Unfortunately, there was a mix-up in the P.E. schedule and another class was in the gym during our scheduled time. It's okay, mistakes happen, and we got to do some movement in our classroom instead!

Reminders:

Home Reading Folders will be coming home Monday for everyone who returned their form - look for them in backpacks! Home reading books can be reread several times and returned when you're finished to switch for a new book. 

Student Shout-Outs!

Nathan, Ava, and Nola - for cleaning our whole classroom after our snowflake activity. There were lots of tiny paper cutting around and they did a great job of clearing our floor and keeping our space tidy!

Micah - today was his last day in our class and we wanted to give him a shoutout to say thank you for being an awesome friend who always runs to help someone when they fall, or are sad, or just need someone to talk to. We just know you're going to make so many friends in your new class!

Have a great weekend!

-Ms. Byrne

Jan 12

 Hello everyone!

This morning we had a morning meeting to talk about using kind words towards each other. We learned that one of our friends was feeling sad because someone said something mean to them. We never want any of our friends to feel that way. So, we took some time to think about a time when someone hurt our feelings and talked about how that made us feel, what we thought about that person, etc. We talked about how nobody should feel sad coming to school and we don't want to be the reason anyone feels bad. Ms. Byrne asked us to come to her if someone is using rude words towards us so that she can talk to them about it and solve that problem.

Today, we started a journal entry about winter. We are thinking about how we know it's winter through our 5 sense. We started with our sense of sight first. We looked at some pictures of winter scenes and discussed what we could see in those pictures that told us it was winter time. We wrote the sentence "I see snow." together and then added it to our journals. Next, we each wrote our own sentence of something we could see in the pictures that told us it was winter. We are going to keep adding to this journal page with sentences about our other senses. 

We filled in our calendar and practiced skip counting by 2s. We completed a round of literacy centres. We're having so much fun learning to read lots of books! We're getting to keep some books in our "Just Right" book bag in our desks. We have also started receiving some extra reading support from Mrs. Trask. She is our literacy specialty teacher and we get to go with her in groups throughout the day to practice reading, letter sounds, and vocabulary. She has been giving us extra books for our Book Bag as well!

After lunch, we had mindfulness time and practiced our letter sounds. We've been using our new word rings in different ways each day to practice our Wow Words. We can't wait to bring our Word Rings home!

In math, we were practicing sorting some more shapes. Today, we got a page of shapes of different types and sizes and we had to decide on a sorting rule for ourselves. We cut out our shapes and chose to sort them by colour, shape, size, or any other sorting rule we could think of. We glued them into 2 groups and wrote our sorting rule on top. 

Before heading to the gym we had a quick science lesson about snowflakes. We learned a little about how snowflakes are made and that the temperature and humidity in the air impact the different snowflake shapes. 

In gym, we worked on our roll techniques and practiced safe landings on the gymnastic mats. 

Reminders:

If you haven't returned your Home Reading permission form, please do so by Friday to ensure a home reading folder is prepare for your child on Monday!

Have a great evening!

-Ms. Byrne

Jan 10

 Hello everyone!

We are happy to be back in our classroom and getting to see each other after a long break. We took some time to share our favourite part of the break with our class. Then, we each got a book called Malaika's Costume. This book is a gift from The Canadian Children's Book Centre. We wrote our name inside the book and then we followed along while Ms. Byrne read the story. We loved the colourful pictures and discussing where Malaika lives (the Caribbean). We wondered if Malaika gets to join her mom in Canada eventually. Then, we saw a picture at the back of a second book where Malaika is wearing winter clothes. We think she must have come to Canada, because even in the winter there is no snow in the Caribbean!

Next, filled in our calendar and talked about how not only the month, but the year has changed as well! We practiced counting by 5s. 

Then, we worked on another Star Student page for our book. Our Star Student today was Stefan! It was a little hard to get back into writing sentences after our break, but we pushed through!

We completed a round of literacy centres after snack and recess. Then it was lunch time!

After lunch, we practiced our letter sounds, and then we talked about our Wow Words. We decided to keep our Wow Words the same this week (in, go, to, my, like) because many of us were away the week before the holiday and missed out on that practice. We made a word ring with those 5 words on it. We wrote the words on pieces of card stock, then put them onto a binder ring. We practiced finding words on our word ring by spinning a wheel that had our words on it, and finding the matching word on our word ring. We would hold up the matching word, and read it together as a class. 

In math we are talking about sorting this week. We looked at a set of shapes on our SmartBoard and tried to find different ways to sort them into groups. We sorted the same shapes by colour, shape, and size. We each got a set of shapes to cut and Ms. Byrne asked us to sort these shapes by their number of sides. We had to sort them into groups with 0 sides, 3 sides, and 4 sides. We cut and glued the shapes together into their matching groups. 

This week in social studies we are comparing our school community to our neighbourhood community. We discussed how in both places people have roles or jobs, how we take care of both communities by keeping things clean and tidy, being kind to others, taking care of each other, etc. We each have a place and a role in our school community. To show this, we are creating a big poster in our classroom of a puzzle. Each piece of the puzzle has one of our names and we will get to decorate them tomorrow with pictures and colours that we like to have the piece represent us. We will leave 1 section of each of our puzzle pieces blank and use it to write kind things about that person. Once the pieces are complete, we will put them together to create the completed puzzle of our classroom!

Reminders:

Please make sure students are coming to school with an appropriate mask. The better they fit, the safer we all are in our classroom! As soon as our mask supplies from the government arrive, we will let you know. 

Home Reading - a form about home reading was put into our backpacks today. Please give it a read-through. Sign and return the form if you would like your child to participate in our home reading program. We will be starting the program on Monday, so please have the form returned by Friday, Jan. 14 if you wish to participate!

Have a great evening!

Jan. 7 - Back to School Update

 Hello everyone,

As I'm sure you've heard, we will be moving back to in-person learning as of Monday, Jan. 10th. 

We have been informed that medical-grade masks and rapid-tests will be distributed to staff and students as soon as possible. They expect those items to arrive at the end of next week and we will receive more information on how they plan to distribute them in the coming days. 

Before returning to school, please ensure that your child has a mask that fits properly and is in good condition. We are recommending wearing medical-grade masks, or doubling masks, whenever possible. Discuss the importance of wearing a mask and maintaining social distancing with your child. One issue we have had is students chewing on the inside of their masks. We will discuss this as a class and explain how this impacts the protection the mask provides. If you could reiterate this as home that would be great!

Now, more than ever, it is important that anyone who is feeling unwell stays home. Please remember to use the daily checklist (click here to access it) to identify whether your child should come to school. All school-based staff will be adhering to this checklist as well. 

Thank you all for helping us keep our school community safe. I look forward to seeing everyone on Monday!

-Ms. Byrne

Jan. 4

 Hello everyone,

I hope you were able to have an enjoyable, restful, and safe holiday. As you know, our break has been extended for students and we are currently awaiting further information. 

Throughout this week teachers will be working to prepare for both possible scenarios (online learning and return to in-person). As soon as we have more information about the scenario for next week (Jan. 10-14) I will post an update here on the blog, as well as send out a SchoolMessenger with any instructions needed. 

Thank you for your continued support and patience as we navigate this ever-changing situation!

-Ms. Byrne