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!