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!