Last week began with a very stimulating and informative workshop with Scientists in the School on Structures. The workshop was delivered in English and afterwards we translated the vocabulary that was introduced into French. The facilitator began by talking about the 3 functions of a structure: to contain, to support and to span.

Then the kids worked at 5 different centres. They looked at different structures and sorted them according to their function:

They sorted objects according to their materials and talked about the properties of different materials:

They worked with different fasteners to see how they hold materials together:

They built the highest tower they could:

And they discussed the strength of different structures and figured out how to brace a square to make it stronger:

Then they had an all-group challenge to try to build a structure from newspaper that would support their teacher! They looked at the relative strength of different shapes, and found that the  cylinder was very strong. So everyone set to making newspaper cylinders which they put together into a stool for me.

 It was an exciting moment when I finally tried sitting on it!

After the workshop, we talked about all the activities in French and began learning the vocabulary that we will be using to talk about structures:

We worked on finishing up our season wheels, and sang our songs with the day names and month names some more:

We also finished off our look at seasonal and daily changes by delving deeper into the reasons for day and night and making sundials. We read a book about day and night, and then worked with tennis balls and flashlights to try to understand how the rotation of the earth makes it seem like the sun travels across the sky. Julie and I did a demonstration using a globe, a puppet and flashlights to illustrate this phenomenon. To make the sundials we needed a sunny day, which finally came last week. Each student was provided with the basic sundial, and throughout the day, on the hour, they marked where the shadow fell. 

Our sight words contained the sounds elle and ette. In writer's workshop we talked about putting together a class book, and came up with some possible themes. After voting on the themes we decided to just put together our best stories.

I also talked about the expectation that students write at least 3 sentences each day. I met with students who lately have been writing less than that, and we came up with some strategies that would help them increase the volume of their writing. Then we shared these strategies with the whole class.

In math, we learned positional language (on, over, under, beside, between...) which we will apply in geometry as well as in our exploration of structures. Julie introduced and practiced the vocabulary with the students using various games and a lovely video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm5WywlwDrM&feature=youtu.be). We took down the flowers used to keep count of the days up to 100, and turned that space into the new Math Board.

Julie also reviewed the 2-dimensional shapes with students, and together they looked at the attributes of each in terms of the number of corners and sides.

Last week was jam-packed, despite the fact that it was a 4 day week. In writer's workshop we talked about the importance of adding details to our writing. First I invited the kids to add details to a picture of a snowman (just 3 circles to begin with). After they had done that we wrote about all the details, with one student at a time coming to the board to add a sentence. We are also focusing more on understanding what makes a sentence and remembering to use punctuation.

Later in the week, in the interest of developing more content for "stories from our lives," I asked the kids to tell a story from recess to a partner, and then we wrote a recess story together as a class. Our sight words contained the sound "ai."

We were joined on Wednesday by our wonderful new student teacher, Julie Lesongeur. Julie is in the Master of Teaching program at OISE and will be with us full-time for 4 weeks starting February 16. She read the students a fractured fairy tale that turned Little Red Riding Hood on its head.

We also sang our songs with the names of the days of the week and the months of the year. We watched a program that talked about the 4 seasons, and I split the class into 4 groups and each group drew what they knew about a season together. Then we started to create Season Wheels, an individual project in which the seasons are illustrated on a wheel that spins to show the yearly cycle. Next week we have our Scientists in the Schools workshop on Structures, and we will move on from Daily and Seasonal Cycles toward focusing on Structures.

In math we worked on adding mixed groups of coins after more practice counting by 5s and 10s. We discovered together that it was more efficient to start by counting the larger coins (dimes) first (10, 20, 30..), then add the nickels and finally the pennies (35, 40, 45, 46, 47, 48). We also prepared for the 100th day by making a paper chain with 100 links. Before we began the chain we figured out how many links each table would contribute, when we have 5 tables. Students offered different strategies for figuring this out, mostly based on counting by 10s. It was quite a challenge in cooperation for each table to produce a chain of 20, in 2 colours, 10 in one colour and 10 in another. The kids worked together really well, and we brought the finished chains of 20 to the carpet to link together into the full chain of 100. Now it hangs proudly on our wall!

There was a lot of excitement in the air when the 100th day finally came, and we placed the last 5-petaled flower on the frame on the wall. Everyone cheered! 

That day I posted all the 100th Day projects that came to school for all to admire:

We did a joint celebration with the other grade 1 classes where we mixed the kids into 3 new groups and each group visited each class for an activity about 100. In room 308 we talked about how much half of 100 would be, and then how much a quarter of 100 would be. Then the kids worked at 4 tables, and each table produced a quarter of an oval design, divided into 5 sections. The kids glued 5 paper cutouts into each section, so that each quarter oval had 25 objects depicted. Then we put the quarters together into a whole oval to make 100 objects.

I told the kids a story about "les chaudoudoux" (warm fuzzies). In the story, everyone has a bag of chaudoudoux to give and when a person receives a chaudoudou it makes them feel warm and soft all over. I asked the kids to think of kind words and actions that make us feel good, like receiving a chaudoudou. We wrote them into a list. Now at the end of each day, we take a moment to tell about any chaudoudoux we gave or witnessed someone else give. We have a bag of pompoms (representing the chaudoudoux) and for each chaudoudou recounted, the person who gave it puts their hand into the bag, pulls out a "chaudoudou," and puts it into a clear box. We are trying to fill the box together. It's a fun way to promote kindness in our classroom community.

We've been learning the comptine we wrote together last week, and we added actions to it.

Our sight words this week contained the digraph "eu" which makes the same sound as "e".  In writer's workshop we've been focusing on technical elements. We added punctuation and capitals to a text that was missing them. We practiced writing really common sight words from the word wall. We played sight word bingo again. And in their writing, each student now has a technical goal that they are working toward, from this list:

I introduced a new reading comprehension strategy: making predictions. So we met "Didi qui prédit" (Didi who predicts) who is a cousin of the Cookie Monster (there's a striking resemblance). Didi is very impatient and is constantly guessing what will happen next in a story. He loves it when the kids make guesses with him.

In math, we've been learning about money. We read a story about using coins to buy different things. I gave each table a bunch of plastic coins and they sorted these into pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, loonies and toonies. Then I asked the students to draw each coin in a chart with the value for the coin. This is all to familiarize the kids with the coin values, before we start to do operations with them. 

We've been talking about daily routines and the changes that happen through the day. Using the information from home about their daily routines, each student made a book that shows a routine on each page and when it takes place. We talked about the movements of the sun in a day, and I asked the kids to show where the sun is for each of the routines in their book. They also showed where the hands on a clock were for each routine. 

We attended an excellent anti-bullying workshop by John Park on Friday afternoon. Through a very entertaining show we heard about the importance of empathy, kindness, respect, and the good old Golden Rule. We went over what to do if someone is mean to you: tell them to stop, walk away, or tell a teacher in cases where the harassment doesn't stop. I will follow up on these ideas next week with the kids.

Your child's first report card will come home on Monday. I recommend not sharing report cards with kids in the early grades. In my opinion, when young kids are overly aware of their performance being evaluated it can interfere with their intrinsic motivation to try new things and learn. Of course, how to handle report cards is a personal decision made by each parent, I'm just putting in my 2 cents!

The most exciting event of the last couple of weeks was our trip to the High Park Nature Centre. This was the culminating event of our unit on Living Beings. We rode there on the streetcar and then walked through High Park for about 15 minutes before finally arriving.

The kids learned about what signs to look for that animals leave behind: tracks, scat, nests, and body parts (feathers, antlers...). They also got to meet the Bearded Dragon who lives at the Centre.

Then the kids learned more about animal signs at hands-on centres. They examined animal pelts, feathers, nests, etc. and tried to match them with the correct animal.

They made bird-feeders using pine cones, suet and seeds.

They made animal tracks in dough and then tried guessing which animal the tracks belonged to.

And, hilariously, they did the same guessing game with scat! They made animal scat out of clay and guessed which animal would have produced it. The kids loved that!

Then we went outside and played a game about animal signs. All the kids got cards and then had to find those with matching cards to theirs (the same print or animal).

We tried feeding the birds from our hands, without success (the kids were amazingly quiet for this though!).

Then we went searching for animal signs, and the kids found so many! After hiking some more we stopped in the woods and listened for birds. Then the kids hung up the bird feeders they had made. 

Then we thanked our hosts and headed back to Lord Lansdowne.

The kids performed their animal puppet shows the following week. They did a great job of learning to read their scripts and delivering their lines while animating their puppets - not easy to coordinate!

The sight words for these previous weeks have been with the sounds "oi" and "ui". We wrote a comptine (nursery rhyme) together, exploring rhyming words. We also identified 4 technical goals in writing for the end of grade 1: writing in lower case, leaving spaces between words, writing in complete sentences with punctuation, and correctly spelling more and more sight words. I asked the kids to each pick a strategy that made sense for them to focus on, and they wrote it on a brightly coloured sticky note and put it in their writing book as a reminder. We also looked at how to read longer words, how to break them into chunks according to the vowels and then read each chunk (syllable) at a time. The song we've been singing is about the days of the week, find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpwf5N0rfVE

In math we continued to work on time-telling and elapsed time. We also did several story problems, focusing on showing HOW we got our answer. The kids are learning the difference between a math drawing (which shows ideas and quantities) and a regular drawing.

Despite the lack of snow, we made snowflakes. It was also a nice chance to review the names of some geometrical shapes, since we'll soon be delving into geometry. That's all for now!