Happy New Year 2015

         

Happy New Year 2015!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for the Christmas cards, holiday cards and wishes, baking, beverages, gift cards, pampering items and more!  Thank you very much parents and boys and girls.  You were very thoughtful.

The first few photos feature our sledding fun with our Learning Buddies in December.

What a COLD week!  The children and I have been keeping warm and active in the classroom this week during indoor recess times.  We “warmed up” the school week with our first Social Studies lesson on Monday with the “hot “topic of GENEROSITY; one of our 4 Circle of Courage goals.  See photo 13, 18 to 20.  The bulletin board in the hallway features personal paragraphs about generosity and how generosity has applied to each of them this school year.

I hope you have all had a chance to view the January calendar which was sent home on Monday and which is available on line on my class website. Check the FUTURE DATE for Boggy Creek Valley day trip, where we will be “camping” and preparing lunch over an open fire.  I will need parents to join us on this trip.

Our new PWIM (Picture Word Inductive Model) poster will focus on this winter trip experience. 

 We have moved on to UNIT 4 in Gr. 2 of Math Makes Sense.  This unit involves children reading dates on a calendar and solving problems involving the number of days in a week and the number of months in a year.  The children will also use non-standard units to estimate, measure, compare and order objects by length, height, distance around and mass.  Non – standard units (no cm rulers) = using cubes, popscicle sticks, paperclips for measuring.

Our new French unit in January involves winter vocabulary:  toque, ski pants, neck warmer, snowsuit, scarf, boots, and more.  This week we have had 3 French lessons about winter clothing and have played Battleship and 7-Up, dramatized the clothing and worked on reading sentences and speaking in a complete sentence (winter strip activity).  We sang Frosty the Snowman and learned another song (photo 12) about winter to the tune of Frere Jacques.

On Friday afternoon, we will be welcoming URDU TEACHER, SUMAIRA SHAIKH, to our classroom for the first of 6 Urdu lessons over the next month or so. 

Over the next few weeks, I will be testing your child’s READING LEVEL (ORR; Gr. 2 = Oral Reading Record & FP Reading scores; Gr. 3). 

Our latest SCIENCE UNIT is MATTER (solids, liquids, gases).  Please ask your child to sing you the Matter Song.   Ask them some questions:  What is a solid?  How do the molecules move?  Is snow a solid, liquid or gas?  Is a bubble a solid, liquid or gas? This week we watched the Brain Pop video about matter and created a chart on the whiteboard of our background knowledge about matter.  We discussed vocabulary including:  properties, characteristics. 

Our phonics letter of the week was Hh.  Read the sentences with your child.   There is even one about Hunter!  One of my focuses was to remove all punctuation from this week’s words and to see if the children could help me place quotation marks, question marks, periods in the correct spots.  This is something you can try to do with your child at home.  Punctuation was an academic goal for many students in the Term I report card/goal setting meeting.

Emaan will be our STUDENT OF THE WEEK on January 12th.

 

Have a wonderful, warmer weekend!   Drive safely and hopefully we will enjoy some warmer weather!

Ms Selimos