Merry Christmas!

Humane Society Visit

Today we had a wonderful visit from Kristin who works at the Humane Society. We talked all about good pet care and the needs of animals. The best part of the visit was Snickers the kitten. She was so cute. Everyone who wanted to got to pet her and she was very happy with all of the attention. Thanks for all of the donations for the shelter. 

Animals In Winter

We had a great presentation this week by the Outdoor Education Dept. Fred brought along a large collection of "stuffed" animals for us to view while we learned about animals in winter. We learned that animals can be true hibernators or they can go into torpor. They can also migrate or use camouflage. At the end of the presentation we had a chance to touch some of the animals. This presentation was to get us thinking about animals we may see or discuss on our outdoor winter trip.

I have requested an outdoor trip for February/March but I don't have a date or location yet. As well I have  a set of junior snowshoes booked for the week of Feb. 4-7. What I usually do on snowshoe week is watch the weather predictions and choose two half days to go snowshoeing in Lakewood Park. We usually need lots of helpers for this activity.

Week of Dec. 10 - 14

Spelling - This week we are concentrating on patterns for long a.

1-day, play, ate, late, plate, rain, again, face, place
2- day, play, ate, place, main, late, race, again, say, plate, face, rain
3- against, unsafe, contain, replace, holiday, Tuesday, forgave, tray, hair, mainly

Math
This week for our first strategy for math facts we are focusing on learning the "doubles" by memory. By doubles we mean 1+1, 2+2, 3+3 etc to 10. Once your child has memorized these, then work on recognizing the reverse in subtraction- so 10-5=?  , 8-4=?  and so on. I will let you know when we move on to the next strategy. It is so  helpful to children to know these facts by memory. You can also practice the facts visually by rolling two dice and having them add them up, or play WAR with playing cards-flip two cards up and then add. When playing WAR try taking out the face cards and higher numbers first. In Grade 2 we are only expected to memorize the facts up to 10 although we still study strategies to add higher facts as well.

Outdoor Gym......Indoors!

So when we have outdoor gym scheduled and it's too cold to go outside for gym we have to use our classroom  for gym. Not so hard. Often we put on an exercise DVD. Today we just put some Christmas music on and danced around to the music!   Another reason I love my job!

Home Reading Program

Congratulations to the students above who already have 50 nights of reading in their Home Reading Duotang. I'm going to put in an article someone gave me some years ago. Hopefully if you click on it, it will be big enough to read. I thought it was very well put.

No spelling list next this week as it is a three day week for the kids- a 5 day week for teachers though! We will be starting "all things Christmasy" this week-Christmas writing, Christmas art, Christmas reading. So I guess for this week we will learn how to spell Christmas!

By the way- you will notice that in our class picture we are looking pretty "casual." On retake day we were surprised to find out that all of the schools' class photos were being retaken due to the fact that our classrooms had changed. The nice thing is that everyone was at school that day so we are all in the picture. Yeah!

NOTE- New password for bookflix

Spelling-Nov. 26-30

Group 1- swing, bring, thing, spend, shop, drop, fresh,
Group 2, slept, chest, spend, desk, bench, swing, think, stick, bring, drink
Group 3- chapter, children, through, shiny, finish, clothes, thought, shoulder, chocolate

Maps and Math Games

Checking out all kinds of maps.

  Playing Break the Bank! A good game to practice counting money as well as tens and ones.

Math

We are finishing up our unit on numbers to 100. A big part of this unit is learning to estimate and use an appropriate referent. For example if there are about 50 objects or less, we would choose 5 as a referent. We count out 5 of the items, see about how much space it takes up or how much it looks like. Then we quickly eyeball the items and count by 5s. For amounts that we think are over 50, we use 10 as a referent.
After estimating then we must correctly count the amount of items. Students are encouraged to count by 2s, 5s and 10s- grouping the items as they go. If they are counting a larger amount of items and are counting by 2s, I encourage them to count by 2s but put them into piles of 10 as they count. This way if they get mixed up they don't have to start all over again- they can just recount the piles of ten which is much faster than recounting by 2s.

Also in this unit is being able to represent numbers to 100 in a variety of ways-particularly looking at the place value. We had an example in our agenda the other day.

I hope this gives you  a better idea of what is expected at this grade level.

Recipe

I have been spending every spare minute on report cards lately so haven't been posting. There are new report cards that are significantly different- a different computer program, a different way of doing comments etc. so on top of continual assessment a bit of a learning curve for the actual report card as well. I finally got around to finding the muffin recipe that we made at Halloween. Many of the parents asked for the recipe so here it is..

Pumpkin Muffins

4 eggs
2 cups sugar
1  1/2 cups veg. oil
2 cups mashed pumpkin
3 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup choc chips

Beat the eggs, sugar and oil. Mix in all of the other ingredients, adding the choc. chips last. Spoon the mixture in the muffin cups. Bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes. This recipe makes a very generous size of 24 muffins.

Good Math Sites

Here are a few links to some fun math games that work on the tens and one place value concepts that we are currently working on.
Shark
FLASH
Mailman

Spelling Nov. 13-16

This week we will be studying the sound of short e. Students often confuse this sound with short a so we will be doing exercises with words with both sounds. As always, we will be working with word families, rhyming words and adding word endings to our list words.

Group 1-went, bed, let, yet, help, end, next
Group 2-bed,step, them,sled, felt, then, rest, went, tent, send, bend, test
Group 3-else, enjoy, pencil, shovel, travel, myself, whenever, twelve, twenty, fence

Pictures

Here are some pictures of our Halloween baking activity. Some parents have asked for the recipe. Believe it or not in all my cleanup I misplaced the recipe. Once report cards are over I will go looking through my home recipes for the one I used. 

 

In Math we are working on "tens and ones."  We are taking numbers up to               

    100 apart and looking at how they are made up of tens and ones. 

November 5-8

There will not be a spelling list this week. We will be having a big quiz that will help us see the progress we are making in our spelling.  It is not a quiz that one studies for.

I am sending home a book order for November. If you wish to order anything for Christmas gifts, put the order in an envelope and make sure you write on the envelope that the items are for gifts. I'll get the gifts to you once the items arrive.

We had so much fun this week cooking our muffins on Halloween. I "renamed" all of the ingredients into spooky themed ingredients such as powdered ghost, ground bones and werewolf turds (their favourite). This was our non-fiction reading. One of the outcomes in our Language Arts curriculum is that students recognize different types of texts. Recognizing a letter, poem, recipe etc. would come under this outcome. It was a fun way to incorporate this outcome into our day. It was also a good way to practice sequencing which we did once we were back in the classroom.

Spelling - Week of October 29

Short u this week
Challenge group-uncle, ugly, study, unable, unless, lunches, jungle, hung, hundred, bunches, difficult
Regular Gr. 2 words- hug, lump, rush, plum, hung, just, luck, much, must, such, where, there
Adjusted- hug, fun, jug, bun, bug, dust, luck, must, buck, when

Computer Class on Tuesday

These are the links we will use for our computer class on Tuesday:

number balance

Odd or Even

100 Chart

Scarecrow Gallery

Here it is....our first video. I apologize to the students who are not in the video. They missed the painting class and the photoshoot so were not able to be in the video.

Spelling Week of October 22

Challenge list- frosty, block, softly, doctor, bottle, across, problem, body, October, clock
Regular list- sock soft, shop, chop, drop, lost, got, frost, forgot,October, from, very
Adjusted list- hot, hot, lost, not, got, off, drop, shop, chop, stop, my

Awesome Art Project

We have been working on "Close-Ups of Scarecrows" for the past two weeks. This project had so many curricular connections as well as looking great! We learned that an artist can show only part of a figure-hence the "close-up". We also learned about horizons. So in the first lesson we drew our scarecrows in crayon. The next week we painted them using watercolour tablets. This is where we learned about mixing colours to make new colours. We did not have green, brown, purple etc. so had to mix basic colours to make new colours. It was an adventure.

Next week we will be giving our scarecrows a personality when we write about them. Using our writing focus of  "ideas and details" we will write about our scarecrows using many details. I hope to make a short video of all of the art work so all the students' scarecrows can be seen on our blog.

These pictures are from the painting class.

 

Busy Week

This week our blog features an art project we did as part of our unit on community. We drew the skyline of a downtown community. See the "Cityscapes" we did below.

In Math we have been working all week on counting patterns by 1's, 2's, 5's and 10's up to 100. One of the ways we practice is to put number cards in order. 

 

Library Trip

On Oct. 26 our class will be walking over to the Sherwood Village Library for a story time and tour. The students will have a chance to take out library books with their own library card. I will send a library card application home with your child. If you fill it out and have it back by Oct. 19 then I can take them to the library. They will have your child's card ready for them when we go to the library.

Spelling List October 15 - 19

This week we are focussing on the short i sound and the word families it can form.

Regular list- pig, tip, hill, chin, lid, bit, sick, drip, swim       Sight words- where, very
Challenge list-trick, comic, music, quick, until, finish, witch, which, little, swim  Sight words- cousin, grandma
Adjusted List-pig, dig, big, tip, lip,ship, hill, fill, kill, fin, win, chin,   Sight words - was, of

Our Week

Well by now you have all heard the big news. Our class was up to 29 kids and most of the classes around us were at 28 kids so the School Board gave us another teacher. Good news and bad. We now have smaller classrooms and fewer split classes but it is still difficult to have move children one month into the school year. It was a very difficult decision deciding who would go into the new classroom. We spent a lot of time thinking of both friendships and working groups. Please trust that these decisions were not made lightly or hastily. We also made sure that the teachers from last year were consulted so we knew about past friendships as well as potential problems. Yes it is upsetting for some of the children- for us too! We are trying to be positive and make these moves go as smoothly as possible. If your child is upset, please help them by trying to stay positive about the moves. I have been through this about five times over the last 15 years and within a week or so, all will settle down. Having said that, please understand that at school we know how upsetting this can be for your child. Lots of hugs over the next week or so! I will make sure that our class and the new grade two class get together for an activity next week.

Congratulations to Coen Wall whose art was selected from our classroom to be shown at the October Art Show at the Regina Public School Board!

This week we did not have a spelling list to study. We spent the week working on various sight words that are difficult to spell. We made up some goofy ways to remember some of the words. We also made word searches using these words and exchanged them with a partner to do.

Doing our word searches.