Grade 1/2 room 3: First week of 2015

Happy New Year to everyone,

Our first week back was great! It was so nice to see everyone and to share stories from our winter break. Since it's a new year, we started off our week by reading "Squirrel's New Year's Resolutions" by Pat Miller and we learned what resolutions are. We then made 3 of our own New Year's Resolutions: One personal; one pertaining to school, and one for home. Their Resolutions were very mature and impressive. This class never seizes to amaze me.

This week we also welcomed two new students: a set of twins (Axel and Ava) that joined our class to make our class number 23 students. The boys and girls have done a wonderful job of making them feel welcome and showing them around. Axel and Ava are adjusting very well to our classroom community.

We also switched our table groups and created new "tribes" table group names.

Field Trip:
This Friday a permission form went out for our upcoming field trip to the Marlies game on February 4th. 5 volunteers have been allocated to each class. If you are interested in coming, please send in your forms. Volunteers will be chosen by drawing names out of a box. I will inform you if your name has been drawn. In the event that your name is not drawn but you would still like to attend the game, you are more than welcome to come, however you will need to use your own form of transportation and pay $25 dollars to attend the event. I'm looking forward to this school-wide trip!

Homework:
Although some homework was sent out this week, please ensure that you have your child read at home. RazKids and IXL is the best homework that they can receive. Reading at home is imperative as it's the only way to really propel and push students along.

Overview of our week:

Stars of the Week:
Congratulations to George and Evie on being voted as the class stars of the week.

Language:
In Language this week we came up with New Year's Resolutions (as mentioned above). We also carried on with a school-wide unit on Stewardship and Respect that we started before the break. Students have been practicing their inferring skills while studying the book "Mama Miti". Also, for creative writing we started a mini art/writing task with the prompt: "If I were trapped/lived in a snow globe". We read the book "The Snow Globe Family" and then we brainstormed different ideas for our writing prompt. Students then drew their own snow globe scene using pastels. On Monday I will take pictures of them and place them on their snow globe drawings. They will continue the good copy next week. Once finished we can display them on our bulletin boards outside. These will look so cute.
We also had a group of students perform the Gingerbread Man in Reader's Theatre. The group did a fantastic job organizing this mini play.

Math:
In Math we started our unit on Data Management. Students worked in groups of 2-3 and were given a question on recycling. They surveyed their classmates and organized their data as they wished. This is a great diagnostic tool before starting a unit. It's great to see what their previous knowledge and experience is with graphing. Additionally, it allows us to see and learn from other students since each group shares their work. Most students used T-charts and tally marks which was a great starting point to kick off our unit. For shared math we graphed our birthdays using a bar graph. We will continue with this unit for the next two weeks. The Data Management curriculum is very close for both grade 1 and 2's, with the exception of Grade 2's needing to learn line plots, and to be able to label their graphs with the correct information.

Science:
In Science we finally completed all of our presentations. Theodore, Savas, Bobby, Alex and Jonathon completed their presentations.
This brought us to our next unit on Air and Water. We collectively created an anchor chart for the importance/uses of air and water. We also made a title page for this unit, and we will delve right into it this upcoming week.

ENJOY SOME PICTURES BELOW: