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.