Oct. 13

 Hello everyone!

We have had a busy week so far! Each morning we have been working on reading our first "just-right" book. It is a book called "The Colours of Fall." We have been practicing the words "I see a..." on each page and then using the picture to help us with the last 2 words of the sentence, a colour and an object. Today we read the whole book together as a class, and then we read the book to a partner. We're very excited to have our very own book that we can read all by ourselves!

During our morning meetings we have been working on some "visualization." We are doing this by reading part of a poem together every day and then drawing the picture that we see in our brains. The poem we are working on is 5 Little Pumpkins. We have 3 parts of the poem done so far and we are going to finish the last part tomorrow before we add it to our Poem folder as another thing that we can read all by ourselves during quiet reading time. 

We also worked on the letter K in our printing books and have been practicing our letter sounds each day. Today, we practiced making words with the letter sounds that we have and talked about what it means when words rhyme (they have the same ending sounds). We wrote the word "at" on our whiteboards by sounding it out, and then added different letters to the beginning to make rhyming words. 

Yesterday we worked on a science project about Fall. After making a big poster with all of the things we learned about what plants, animals, and people are doing in the Fall, we each created a drawing that represented Fall. We looked at our class target to discuss how we could do our best work on our pictures. If we included ideas things we had learned about each of those 3 groups, we would be in the centre of the target! We each met with Ms. Byrne to tell her all about what we had drawn in our pictures. 

Today, we reviewed what we have learned so far about being unique. We discussed that some of the things that makes us each unique on the inside are the things that we know and can do! Did you know that over half our class can speak 2 languages? Some of us are learning to play instruments or have other special talents like drawing, painting, playing a sport, etc. We shared all about the things we can do. Then, we began writing a journal entry with the sentence "I can ___________." We wrote about things that we can do that make us unique and special. Talk to us at home about what makes us and our family unique!

We also worked on the number 8 in our printing books. We realized there are so many ways to show 8! We found 3 different ways we could show 8 just using dice! We have started to talk about adding and subtracting with 1. So far, we have practiced using blocks to show adding and subtracting 1. Tomorrow, we are going to look at how we can use a number line or 100s chart to do these problems. 

We were very excited today to get to use iPads at school for the first time! We learned how to log in to Raz-Kids and practice reading books. It was a bit tricky, but we really enjoyed listening to the story, and then trying to read it ourselves. Ms. Byrne gave each of us a paper with our Raz-Kids information on it to bring home so that we can practice reading at home too! Raz-Kids is a free app for any tablet or phone. You can also use it through the website: www.kidsa-z.com on a laptop or computer.

You may have heard that this week we have started playing with the parachute during our gym time. We have had so much fun! So far we have practiced making different sized waves with the parachute, playing switch-a-roo, and playing "popcorn."

Have a great day!

-Ms. Byrne

Oct. 7

 Hello everyone!

Today, we learned about the word grateful. We read a story about what it means to be grateful and then shared some things that we are grateful for in our lives. We wrote a journal entry about things we are grateful for. 

We continued to talk about being special and unique in social studies. Today, we each partnered with a classmate and tried to find 1 way we were alike, and 1 way we were different. We shared our findings wth the class and talked about how each member of our class is a unique person, but we all can find things that we have in common as well. 

We used our gumball game to practice our letter sounds. So far we are focusing on the symbols and sounds for: p, b, t, d, f, and v. Talk to us about these letters at home by finding the letters in our favourite books, practicing the sounds together, drawing the letters or making them out of playdough, blocks, and other materials. 

Yesterday in math we talked about the number 7 and completed a page all about 7 in our printing books. Today, we revisited the pattern work we did in our math books and added a pattern of our own. We wrote the rule for our pattern as well!

In Science, we finished our poster about the things plants, animals, and people are doing in the Fall. We have read lots of stories about Fall so we have many ideas! Next week, we are going to use these ideas to draw a Fall scene to show what we have learned. 

We had P.E. with Mrs. Sterne at the end of the day. We practiced some soccer skills. 

Reminders:

- Friday, Oct. 8 - No School - PD Day

- Monday, Oct. 11 - No School - Thanksgiving 

- Tuesday, Oct. 19 - Picture Day

Have a wonderful long weekend!

-Ms. Byrne

Oct. 5

 Hello everyone!

We had a new friend added to our class yesterday! We were very kind and helpful to her as she started learning about our classroom and school. 

We started our morning by switching our library books and doing some quiet reading at our desks. Then, we had our class meeting. We filled in our calendar and practiced our counting songs. Yesterday, we talked about our class goals and wrote that our math goal is: I can count to 100 by 1s, 5s, and 10s. Once we feel confident with that goal, we will check it off and create a new one! Our goals help remind us why we are doing each activity at school. 

Mr. Wiens came to teach music and then we started working on the letter V. We had been practicing the letter v sound during our Gumball Game, so we knew the sound already! We listened to our letter v songs and brainstormed a list of words that start with v. We took a break to eat snack and have recess, and then filled in our letter v page in our printing books. 

Next, we read a story about what makes us unique. We talked about what the word unique means and how everybody in our class has things that make them unique. Those things make us special and interesting and are an important thing to celebrate! We learned that people can be unique in ways that we can see: hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, size, shape. And in ways that we can't see: the languages they speak, their interests and hobbies, if they like having more alone time or more time with friends, etc. We are going to be doing some journal entries about ways that we are special and unique. Talk with us at home about things that make us unique!

After lunch we had mindfulness time and then practiced our letter sounds again. We noticed that with the sounds we know so far we can already make some words! We wrote the words bat, pat, and fat using the sounds we have been practicing!

Next it was time for math. Today, we looked at some addition sentences and talked about what the symbols mean. We discussed that the + symbol stands for plus, or addition, and that it means to put things together. We learned that the = symbol, or "equals" means the same. So when we say 1+1=2 what we're really saying is that if we have 1 red marker and 1 black marker, it's the same as saying we have 2 markers. We practiced some +1 number sentences using blocks to help us find the solutions.

In science we have been learning all about Fall. We used our 5 senses to explore how we know that Fall is here. Yesterday, we went on a leaf hunt and each brought 1 leaf into our classroom. We compared the different leaves we found. We learned that the colours we see in Fall are the actual colours of those leaves! The green colour we see in Spring and Summer is caused by the food that the tree makes for itself. When the weather gets colder and the days get shorter, the tree makes less food and the leaves go back to their actual colour! Today, we also talked about what happens to trees that don't have leaves, and then moved on to learning about what animals are doing in the Fall. We looked at pictures of different animals and guessed what they needed to do during Fall to get ready for the cold Winter! We will continue learning about this topic throughout the week to get ready for an art project where we will create a picture that represents Fall. 

Reminders:

Friday, Oct. 8 - No School - PD Day

Monday, Oct. 11 - No School - Thanksgiving

Have a great day!

Oct 1st.

 Hello everyone!

We started our day with some reading time. Then we had our very first school assembly! Each class got a chance to share their Pillars of Care award winners for September. It took a long time, but we sat quietly and listened respectfully for the whole thing!

Our calendar was changed today for October! We talked about where the number 1 needed to go on the calendar and filled in all the information. We practiced skip counting by 10s and then competed a number of the day activity with the number 13. Then it was time for snack. 

We had P.E. on the compound today and practiced some kicking skills that we have been learning with Ms. Sterne.

Next, we used a SmartBoard game to practice our letter sounds! We talked about how some letters are consonants and some are vowels. We practiced the sounds for: p, b, t, d, f, v and a. Ask us what sounds those letters make! We practiced our letters in a different way as well. We got out our whiteboards special markers. Ms. Byrne would say a letter sound and we would try to write the letter that matches that sound on our boards. We added writing the capital and the lowercase as an extra challenge. This helps get another part of our brain thinking about the sounds and is really helpful for when we start trying to write on our own!

We continued with our reading lessons by learning a new word: visualization. We use visualization in reading to help us understand a whole story. When we hear a word, sentence, or part of a story or poem, we can create a picture in our heads of what it might look like. When it's a full story, we can even play it like a movie in our heads! We practiced visualization by listening to Ms. Byrne say a word, then drawing the picture that we saw in our heads. We tried with 4 different words today, then we shared with a partner to find how our pictures were similar and how they were different. 

Reminders:

- Oct. 8th - No School - PD Day

- Oct. 11th - No School - Thanksgiving 

Have a great weekend!

- Ms. Byrne

Reminder - Orange Shirt Day Tomorrow

 Hello everyone,

Just a friendly reminder that Orange Shirt Day is tomorrow. We discussed why we have Orange Shirt Day today, and will continue to do more work around this tomorrow. If you have an orange article of clothing for your child to wear, please have them wear it tomorrow! I will have orange bands for the kids to wear around their wrist if they do not have any orange clothing. 

We will be participating in a smudge ceremony tomorrow morning with a special guest, Preston Huppie. Today, we discussed what a smudge ceremony is and what we will be doing. We also wrote some positive intentions for our school year and put them together in an offering that we will give to Mr. Huppie during the ceremony. Ask us to show you how to smudge this evening! 

There is no school on Thursday, Sept. 30th to observe the Day of Truth and Reconciliation.

- Ms. Byrne 

Sept. 27

Hello everyone! 

    We had a lot of things to talk about this morning. When we walked into our classroom we had less desks because some of our friends have moved to the new class taught by Ms. Diduch. Some of our desks got moved around, and now we have more room to socially distance! Next, we shared some things from our weekend and sang a happy birthday song to Finn, who had a birthday over the weekend. We learned that this week is very special because we will be having Orange Shirt Day on Wednesday. Through our learning about the medicine wheel we have talked about Indigenous people before, but we watched a quick video that helped explain what the word Indigenous means and why they are very important people. We learned that Indigenous means the first people to live on this land. There are many different groups of Indigenous people: Metis, First Nation (which has lots of different groups of it's own), and Inuit. Ms. Byrne reminded us of the Acknowledgement of the Land that we hear sometimes at school. She told us that we do an Acknowledgement of the Land to show respect for the Indigenous people who lived, and still live, on this land. We talked about how Indigenous people lived on this land long before other people came here, and long before this land was even called Canada. Some of us knew already that when other people came to this land, some really bad things happened to Indigenous people. Ms. Byrne told us that this history is a part of why we have Orange Shirt Day - to show respect and support for Indigenous people. We will be talking more about the reason we have Orange Shirt Day tomorrow during our morning meeting (Residential Schools), so we may have some questions and things we want to talk about with you at home as well. 

    We filled in our calendar and some of us got to be helpers at the Smartboard! We moved on to our Star Student time and today we got to learn all about Ava. We wrote 5 facts about Ava and then took a break for our first recess and snack time. After recess, we filled in a page about her for our class book. We practiced drawing her one step at a time so that our pictures could be our best work! 

    After lunch, we had some mindfulness time and then worked on creating patterns using blocks. We each got 3 colours of blocks and brought them to our desks. Ms. Byrne wrote a pattern rule on the whiteboard (ex: AB, ABC, AAB) and we created a pattern to match the rule with our blocks. We had lots of fun creating different patterns! 

    Before our second recess, we took some time to talk about the fourth pillar of care - Care for Place. We talked about how this pillar could be connected to different parts of the medicine wheel, but we are going to use the Spirit section to represent it. We talked about how taking care of our space in the classroom, community, and the world is important and can help us take care of our minds, bodies, and hearts as well. We shared some ideas for ways that we can show Care for Place. We will finish the last section of our medicine wheels tomorrow. 

    When we returned from recess, we took some time to talk about Terry Fox. We learned a little about Terry and watched a video of him from when he started his Marathon of Hope. We talked about how important Terry and his foundation have been in raising money to help find a cure for cancer. Ms. Byrne told us that Terry Fox is a very important person to her, because Ms. Byrne's dad had the same type of cancer as Terry Fox when she was little. Luckily, because of all the new ways we have to help people who have cancer, her dad was able to get better! We each got a big sticker to take home today. Please talk to us about anyone in our family or a friend who may have had cancer. We can write their name on our sticker together and bring it back to school tomorrow to wear on our shirts during the Terry Fox Run. If we don't have anyone in our life who has had cancer, we can write Terry Fox on the sticker instead to show our support. Remember to send the sticker back tomorrow so we can wear it during our run! 

Reminders: 

- Sept. 28 - Terry Fox Run - You can submit any donations here: 

 http://www.terryfox.ca/BeddingtonHeights

- Sept. 29 - Orange Shirt Day 

- Sept. 30 - No School - Day of Truth and Reconcilation 

 Have a great day!

Sept. 20

 Hello everyone,

Yesterday, we had a long morning meeting because there was lots to talk about! We had some things to share from our weekend, and then we talked about the election. Ms. Byrne told us that our school had an important part in the election because people would be coming to our school to vote. We had lots of questions about what people were voting for and why. Ms. Byrne told us that people were voting to decide who would be the next Prime Minister of Canada. Of course, we wanted to know what it means to be Prime Minister! So, we talked about how the PM gets to make lots of big decisions about our country and when grown-ups vote they are working together to decide who gets to make those big decisions. Everybody gets to vote in secret so that everyone can decide for themselves and not feel pressure from anyone else to vote a certain way. We were very interested in the election and how it works, so we may have more questions at home! 

We continued our morning meeting discussion about comfortable and uncomfortable feelings. We revisited our chart and listed some uncomfortable feelings and when we might feel them. Today, we used these feelings and a story called "Kindness is a Kite String" to help us talk about Care for Others, and the "heart" section of our medicine wheels. We brainstormed some ways that we can show care for others and we will work on writing them to create our next medicine wheel section tomorrow. 

Today, we worked on the letter T. We reviewed the sounds we have already learned and practiced the T sound as well. We followed our letter routine of listening to a song about the letter, practicing the sound together, tracing the shape of the letter in the air, and brainstorming words that begin with T. We made a chart with our ideas, then got our printing books to fill in the letter T page. 

Now that we have practiced different patterns and their rules, we each got 2 colours of blocks yesterday to create a pattern. We took pictures of our patterns, then made new ones. After we had each made 3 different patterns using our blocks, we took them apart and created something that was not a pattern to compare. Today, we got to work with 3 colours of blocks. Once we made a pattern, we laid it onto a whiteboard and then used our whiteboard marker to label it! Check out some pictures of our pattern work below:

Not a pattern!

A pattern!

A pattern!

Not a pattern!

In science, we have been talking about our 5 senses. For the last 2 days we have been talking about our sense of sight. We learned about some parts of our eye: our iris, pupil, eyelashes, and eyelid. We learned what each part helps with. We talked about how our pupil can get bigger and smaller, depending on the light. We looked at some optical illusions to talk about how some things can trick our eyes! Today, we talked about how our eyes can see colours and how some people see colours differently than others. We looked at a colour blindness test and talked about how someone who is colourblind might see that test. 

Reminders:

- Thank you for sending in your signed Digital Citizenship forms - we almost have the whole set! If you have not returned yours, please do so ASAP so we can begin using educational apps to support our classroom learning

- Friendly reminder - with the issued state of emergency it has become even more important to adhere to our school safety measures. Please do not enter the compound during school hours if possible. If you need to enter the compound area ensure that you are wearing a mask. Discuss the importance of wearing your mask at school and maintaining distance when possible with your child(ren). Please be sure to send a mask with your child each day - and an extra if possible!

- Thursday, Sept. 23 - Meet the Teacher - virtual information sessions through Teams. 2 sessions - 6-6:45PM and 7-7:45PM. A link will be sent to you, click the link at the start of your chosen session time to access. You will be able to access the session on a phone, tablet, or computer. You can use Teams through your browser and do not need to download an app or program unless you choose to do so. 

- Friday, Sept 24 - No School - PD day

- Tuesday, Sept. 28 - Terry Fox Run

- Wednesday, Sept. 29 - Orange Shirt Day

- Thursday, Sept. 30 - No School - Day of Truth and Reconciliation

Have a great evening!

- Ms. Byrne