April 29

Hello everyone!
We had our first in-person assembly today. It was very exciting to get to see everyone in the gym together. We also got to see a wonderful video that Mr. Berry made with pictures of our school throughout the year. We were happy to see that some pictures of us with our giant snowman in the video! Our winners this month were very brave and stood up in front of the whole school to show off their awards. Some of our winners even said their own names on the microphone!

After the assembly we had snack and filled in our calendar. We worked on our journal entries about The Barnabus Project. Then we reviewed what we had learned in the beginning and middle of the story. We read the end of the story and talked about the important things that happened at the end. Yesterday, we talked about how a new character was introduced during the middle of our story. We discussed how in a lot of stories, a new character that appears in the middle helps to solve the problem. That was the case in The Barnabus Project! The new character helped the creatures escape from the lab. We drew and wrote about the ending in our journals. 

Yesterday, we used our colour mixing checklist to asses our paintings. If we were missing a colour or technique from the list, we had some time today to add some final details and completed the checklist! By the time we finished these details, it was already time to tidy up for home!

Reminders:

- Hats on for Mental Health Day is on Wednesday, May 4th. Students are allowed to wear hats in class this day!

Growing Smiles Spring Fundraiser   It's Spring! That time of year again where everything is new and beautiful and growing! Beddington Heights Elementary is happy to be Fundraising with Growing Smiles once again we will be selling beautiful hanging baskets, along with many varieties of potted plants. Our Campaign is starting Friday April 29th - Friday May 13th. Orders will arrive Thursday May 26th at Beddington Heights School  Pick up time to be determined closer to delivery date. Please click the link below and place your order. Feel free to share with your family and friends! Please place child's name, teacher's name (if you know it) and grade on order form to assist with sorting. You can make payments via credit cards or e-transfer to beddingtonpca.ca  Password :plants If you have any questions about the fundraiser, please send us an email at beddingtonpca@gmail.com https://beddingtonheightsschool.growingsmilesfundraising.com/home   [beddingtonheightsschool.growingsmilesfundraising.com/home]

April 27 - Spirit Day on Friday!

 Hello everyone!

We have been busy bees so far this week! We continue to work on our book study of The Barnabus Project. We drew and wrote about the beginning of the story in our journals. We discussed all the things that we usually learn in the beginning of a story. 

We were able to find the answers to all these questions in the beginning of The Barnabus Project! Today, we read on to the middle of our story. We talked about how the story changes in the middle. We're not just learning about our characters and setting anymore, things are starting to happen! This is where the story starts to climb towards the most exciting part. But, the problem isn't solved yet! Tomorrow, we will add the middle of the story to our journal entries and read the ending of the story.

We've been changing up some of our literacy centres! We changed our iPads centre to a SmartBoard centre, where we get to play a sight word game on the SmartBoard with our group. We are also working on changing our centre teams! We'll get our new teams next week. In guided reading, we have been learning about Bossy R (or R-controlled vowels). We learned that when r comes after a vowel, it changes that vowel's sound. We can see this in words like: star, spider, shirt, fork, and purple (/er/, /ir/, and /ur/ usually make the same sound, while /ar/ and /or/ have their own sounds). We'll be practicing the Bossy R pairs over the next couple of weeks! Some groups have also been working on expression when reading. We've been looking at different punctuation, as well as altered text (like bold words or ALL CAPITALS) and practicing using an expressive voice to read those parts of a story. 

We built pyramids yesterday using a pyramid net. We used our nets to help us fill in the information in our 3D solids book about pyramids. We also had some time on Mathletics today! 

Most of our afternoons have been used to work on our paintings for our mixing colours project. Today, we cut out the elements of our pictures and glued them into place. We also did some painting if we needed to catch up. Tomorrow, we will look at our checklists and see if any final touches need to be added before we are all done!

Reminders:

Character Day - On Friday, we will get to experience our first in-person assembly! We are so excited to get to go to the gym with the whole school to find out who our Pillars of Care winners are. To help celebrate this exciting day, we are also having a spirit day - dress as your favourite character day! Students can dress up as a character from a book, movie, TV show, etc. Usual costume rules apply (no weapons, or costume masks). 

Have a great day!

-Ms. Byrne

April 25

 Hello everyone!

We started our day with our Wow Word Review. Then, we got our new Wow Words. They are:

1. after

2. today

3. his

4. school

5. three

We drew a heart around the "ch" in school, because we think it sounds more like a /k/. That means, we have to learn this part of the word by heart, since we cannot sound it out! We decided to focus on the double o sound for our bonus words. They are:

1. cool

2. pool

3. fool

4. tool

5. drool

We will be working on a book study this week! We are studying "The Barnabus Project." We will be digging into each part of the story to help us understand story structure and the process of writing a story. We are starting by identifying the beginning, middle, and end of the story and talking about what is included in each part. We read through The Barnabus Project for the first time on Friday to introduce it. We looked closely at the cover and the title first to see if we could predict anything about the story. We made some guesses about what the story would be about. We learned that titles and cover pages often has clues for us about the story inside!

We filled in our calendar, and joined Mrs. Young's class for recess. We returned to class to eat snack and have literacy centres. 

After lunch, we added the information we have learned about cubes to our 3D shape book! We are learning about pyramids next and started working on our nets for this shape. Did you know there are different kinds of pyramids? They can have different bases. Many examples of pyramids have a square-base, but there are also triangular-based, rectangular-based, hexagonal-based pyramids, and others! We are making a square-based pyramids using our nets since that is the most common. A pyramid's faces come together to form an "apex," which is the vertex at the top of the pyramid!

We had our second recess, and we were going to work on our mixing colours project in science, but the fire bell went off right when we were coming in! Most of our painting time got taken up by the fire drill, so when we came back in we decided to review the checklist that Ms. Byrne made using all of our ideas about how to make our mixing colours project our best work. We reviewed the ideas we came up with that we thought each picture should include (primary colours, secondary colours, tints, and shades). When we have put our pictures together, we will use the checklist to review it and make sure we have included each! We also added a section to the checklist where we get to give ourselves a 1, 2, 3, or 4 on our own pictures! We used a target to show the numbers (1 being furthest away from the bullseye, 4 being the bullseye). We have used checklists, and a whole class target to help us plan out what our best work looks like before (ex: drawing letters in the red, yellow, and green on our classroom target to show what our best letters should look like). But, this is our first time using a "rubric" like this to assess a whole project! 

We had P.E. with Mrs. Sterne at the end of the day. We used balloons to help us review racket skills! 

Reminders:

Volunteer Clearance - if you would like to volunteer in our classroom, particularly to assist us during our in-class field trip on June 1st, please call the office to being applying for your volunteer clearance!

Have a great day!

-Ms. Byrne

April 20

 Hello everyone!

We hope you had a great long weekend! Yesterday, we did some experimenting with the snow and decided to try and build a giant snowman. We had to figure out how to make each snowball the right size so that it wouldn't tip over. We also had to find a way to fill in any gaps and "glue" the snowballs together to create our snowman. We worked together to problem solve and ended up with the biggest snowman we'd ever seen - it was even taller than Ms. Byrne! Here are some of us standing with our giant creation:

Yesterday, we had our word review and got our new Wow Words. All our words this week can be sounded out, and we think it's a good batch of words for a short week! They are:

1. make

2. down

3. run

4. so

5. but

Our bonus words all have a King E on the end, making the other vowel say their name. They are:

1. cake

2. bake

3. take

4. shake

5. snake

In our reading groups this week, many of us are practicing a strategy for sounding out big words! We use the syllables to help us chunk the word up into smaller pieces. For example, one of our groups sounded out the word "magnetic" today. First, we use a whiteboard to "drag down the vowels," then we put "walls" around each vowel (writing the consonants that are on either side). We sound out each chunk of the word. Finally, we put the chunks back together to read the whole word!

Here's a picture of the strategy when we used it to help us read the word "sentences":

We started playing a new game for 10 minutes each day where we race to practice sight words! We get to come up and try the game on the SmartBoard. If you are looking for a fun sight word game for us to try at home, try this one: Snowball Fight!

In math, we have started our unit on 3D shapes. Yesterday, we learned about the difference between 2D and 3D shapes. Today, we got to explore some cube shapes and talked about what we noticed about them. We learned that 3D shapes are usually described using 3 things: their number of faces, number of edges, and number of vertices. We used our cubes to help us count these! We learned that we can make our own 3D shapes using a "net." We each got a net for a cube and carefully cut it out. We can't wait to learn how to fold it tomorrow!

In science, we are working on completing our colour unit by painting our final picture. We got to choose 2 elements today to begin painting (ex: a butterfly, a tree, a dragon, a sun). Once we get all the pieces painted, we will cut them out, paint a background, and glue the pieces on to make a scene! We made a list of everything we have learned about colours to make sure we include an example of each in our final product: primary colours, secondary colours, tints, shades, cool colours, and warm colours. We will use our own individual checklist to identify each element in our picture. We had a couple of paint spills happen today. We do use washable paint, but if you are concerned about your child's clothes getting messy, feel free to send a painting shirt (something you don't mind getting dirty!) and they can wear it over their clothes during painting time! 

Reminders:

Volunteers are now allowed in the school!  We will be doing an in school field trip on June 1st.  We will need volunteers for this activity.  You will need volunteer clearance in order to volunteer!  Please contact the office to get your volunteer clearance.  It can sometimes take a while so please complete it as soon as possible.

Have a great evening!

-Ms. Byrne

April 13

 Hello everyone!

We have been working on finishing up several units over the last few days. We have lots of projects we are working on!

In literacy, we finished up our focus on predicting by completing a short predicting assessment. It is a tricky topic for us, but we showed lots of improvements throughout these 6 weeks! At the same time, we spent last week working on sequencing and using "first, next, then last" to help us retell a story. This week we have been practicing this using books we have read. This skill will help us when we start working on climbing stories very soon! We are also working on using our 5 senses to help add detail to our writing. We completed our "I know it's Spring because..." journal yesterday and used 5 senses words to help us describe the changing seasons. Here are some of our writing examples:

Today, we used our writing time to complete our Spring checklist as a part of a Science assignment we are working on. We had to choose 2 things about animals in Spring, 2 things about plants, and 2 things about people. We wrote our ideas on a checklist. Now, we will use that checklist to help us create a poster showing our knowledge about Spring changes. 

In math, we continued to work on place value with 2-digit numbers. Yesterday, we played a game together. Ms. Byrne rolled special dice that has 10 sides! The first number we rolled, we put into the 10s spot in a place value chart, the second number we rolled we put into the 1s spot. We used our place value blocks to model the number, then we had to say the number out loud (ex: 7 tens and 8 ones means seventy-eight). Then, we wrote the number beside our place value chart. We added 12 of these numbers in our math books, so we got lots of practice! Today, we worked on more games to practice our number sense. We got to use dice on our own to follow the game we learned yesterday, another group used spinners to spin a 2-digit number, then count on from that number to fill in the next 3 numbers (ex: if we rolled 2 and a 3, we would write 23, then 24, 25, 26). Another group worked on some 100s charts that were missing numbers! They worked to fill in the numbers that were missing. Some 100s charts were missing just a couple numbers, others were missing lots of numbers! We had to look closely to count on from the numbers that were there. The last group worked with Ms. Byrne so that she could see how we used addition and subtraction strategies and if there were any of us that needed some extra help in this area. This will allow Ms. Byrne to make sure everyone has a strong understanding of addition and subtraction before we move on!

As we mentioned before, in Science we are working on our final project about Spring - a Spring poster. We used our checklist today and added the ideas we came up with about animals, plants, and people in Spring to help us show everything we have learned in our pictures. Once our pictures our complete, we get to start working on our paintings for the colour unit as well! So much going on in Science!

Student Shoutouts:

Finn - tomorrow will be Finn's last day in our class, so we wanted to give him a shoutout for being a great friend this year! Finn has worked very hard during his time in our classroom. He loves to help friends by reading to them, helping them sound out words, and sharing his creative ideas. Your new class will be lucky to have you!

Reminders:

No School - Friday, April 15th - Good Friday

No School - Monday, April 18th - PD Day

If you would be available to volunteer in our classroom, please contact the office to complete the volunteer clearance forms! We have an in-school "field trip" scheduled for the end of May and will need some volunteers to help us that day! It can take a while to get the clearance completed, so the sooner you can get the process started the better!

Have a great evening!

-Ms. Byrne

April 11

 Hello everyone!

As I'm sure many of you heard, last week Ms. Byrne tested positive for Covid and had to stay home. She's feeling much better and was able to be back with us today! She is wearing her mask and we're trying to practice social distancing as much as possible within our classroom. 

Because Ms. Byrne was away last week, we kept our Wow Words the same. Today, we got new Wow Words and there were lots of heart words to practice! Our new words are:

1. one* (the o is not making it's usual sound)

2. two* (the w is not making it's usual sound)

3. come (the o sounds like a /u/ and, the e looks like a king e, but is not following the king e rule!)

4. yellow

5. year 

Our bonus words are based on the /ear/ sound. These letters can make different sounds (ex: hear vs. heard), but we are focusing on the /year/ sound for now. Our bonus words are:

1. hear

2. fear

3. tear

4. ear

5. near

This morning, we also worked on a writing piece about how we know it is Spring. We practiced 5 senses words (ex: I hear, I see) to explain how we are noticing the seasonal changes around us. We are working on a new bulletin board for outside our classroom to share with the whole school how we have learned about the seasons throughout the year and how we have used Indigenous ways of knowing to help us explore this topic. 

With the loosening of restrictions, we also are now allowed to have a little more choice with our recess time. We decided to start joining Mrs. Young's class during their recess time so that we can play with some friends we might know from Kindergarten, and to give us a chance to make new friends! 

We completed 2 rounds of literacy centres and then it was lunch time. 

After lunch, we played a word game together. Then, we worked on some place value with 2-digit numbers. We talked again about how each digit in the number means different things and that's why the order of the numbers is important. We got our 10s and 1s blocks from our bins and used them to model a few different numbers. We looked at a place value chart and talked about how it can help us understand numbers a little better. Ms. Byrne put some numbers into the place value chart and we used our blocks to model those numbers too. Then, we worked on some number riddles together! Each riddle had clues to help us guess the mystery number like, "I have a 7 in my 10s place. When you add my digits together, they equal 10. What number am I?" We practiced a couple of riddles together as a class and then tried one on our own!

We had our second recess and then did some planning for our final colour project - a colourful painting! We made a list of things that our picture would need in order to show what we had learned: primary colours, secondary colours, light colours, dark colours. We sat with a partner to talk about what we would like to include in our pictures. We each got a chance to share what our picture would be and Ms. Byrne made a list of the outlines she will need to print to help us put our pictures together!

In gym, we taught Ms. Byrne how to play BellyBall since we learned that game last week! It's a lot like kickball, but instead of small bases, we have big mats and lay on the bases on our bellies. We had lots of fun playing!

Reminders:

No School - Friday, April 15th - Good Friday

No School - Monday, April 18th - PD Day

If you would be available to volunteer in our classroom, please contact the office to complete the volunteer clearance forms! We have an in-school "field trip" scheduled for the end of May and will need some volunteers to help us that day! It can take a while to get the clearance completed, so the sooner you can get the process started the better!

Have a great evening!

-Ms. Byrne

April 1

 Hello everyone!

There was no blog on Wednesday because Ms. Byrne had to be away for the afternoon and all day Thursday. Our guest teacher, Ms. Lawrence, said we were a wonderful class to work with!

While Ms. Byrne was away, we started working on the first step of writing a climbing story, sequencing. We tried to read a book together by opening to random pages. It didn't make any sense! When you're writing a climbing story, it is very important for the events to be in the correct order. We each got a set of 3 pictures that we had to cut out and put into the correct order. We wrote a sentence to go with each picture using the words "first, then and last." This helped us tell a climbing story in the proper sequence. 

On Tuesday, we learned about tints and shades. We learned that tints are lighter versions of a colour, shades are darker versions. We each got to pick a primary colour to work with. We painted a rectangle using our primary colour, then we added white to our primary colour to create a tint. We painted another rectangle using this new colour. We continued to do this until we had created 3 tints and 3 shades of our primary colour. 

Today, we had a very special project to complete. Weeks ago, we learned that Mrs. Paolini, our school librarian, had sadly passed away. As she was a beloved member of our school community, we decided that each member of our school would create a card to be displayed during her upcoming funeral. We created crayon-resist flowers today and then did a water-colour wash over top. We got to decide if we wanted to draw a tulip or a sunflower on our card. We coloured then carefully with crayons, and then took turns working at the painting table to do a colour wash with water-colour paints. They turned out beautifully! We wrote a message inside the cards as well. Ms. Byrne collected the cards and is passing them on to Mrs. Paolini's family. 

This project took us a long time! So, by the time we filled in our calendar and completed our basic facts assessment, it was time to get ready for home!

Student Shoutouts:

Whole class - Our shoutout is for the full class today because of the wonderful comments we got from our guest teacher. She said we were kind, helpful, and excellent listeners!

Have a wonderful weekend!

-Ms. Byrne