lundi le 20 octobre, 2014
This week in Language Arts student have started writing a weekly journal entry. Today for example, students wrote about what they will be dressing up as for Halloween. We are looking at making complete sentences with a noun (or pronoun), verb and as many descriptive adjectives as possible. Each sentence needs a capital letter at the beginning and a period at the end. Also, now that we know what a common and proper noun is, we need to make sure our proper nouns are always written with a capital letter, even if it's in the middle of our sentence. This week, we are also starting our reading groups. Students will read together in groups of 5 or 6 while we focus on one or more reading strategies. This week our strategy is sounding out the words, while following along with our finger.
In Math this week we are working on our number sense by reviewing number patterns and learning to situate numbers on a number line. This will help us as we transition into addition and subtraction. During our morning calendar we are graphing our weather and temperature patterns, while also practicing adding numbers up to 1000 using our number of the day. For example, today our number was 349. We added 10, subtracted 10, added 25 and looked at the place value of 3, 4 and 9 (ones, tens and hundreds). Our numbers will get larger as we progress.
In Science, students are working in groups of 2 or 3 and are doing research on a planet in our solar system. Each group is posting their findings on our classroom research poster, where we are learning how to say and write large numbers and their units (eg celcius, km). The information on our poster is: distance from the sun, temperature, length of one day, diameter and colour. Next Monday we have a special presentation from the Royal Astronomical Society. They will help answer all the student-generated questions we have about space.
Halloween is fast approaching, and we are integrating this theme into many of our activities. This past Friday, students created a Picasso Cubist-style pumpkin face. Students learned about the life of Picasso, one of the most famous Spanish artists of the 20th century. Come and see our creations posted in the class!
This year, we are lucky to have a French Language assistant. Mr Gomez comes a few times per week and so far this term he is doing some exciting Oral Language and drama activities.
Friday October 24th is a PROD day and therefore there will be no school. As per usual, our dictée this week will be on Thursday (view previous post to see this weeks dictée words). Students will also write their spelling words for next week in their agendas (in case they want to start practicing them over the weekend!).
Finally, just a reminder that school ends at 11:50am both tomorrow (Tues, Oct 21) and Wed, Oct 22rd for parents/teacher interviews.
I look forward to meeting with all of you. Have a wonderful week! Elise Garcin