Classroom update October 30

It was a busy week last week.  We ended with our Eldorado Excellence assembly on Friday and we celebrated the many responsible Eldorado citizens that we have at our school.  We celebrated 2 from our classroom who always come prepared with their materials, they always take responsibility for the tasks they are assigned, they always fully participate in all lessons and activities and they help out around the classroom.  Congratulations to those two students.  Make no mistake, we have MANY people who fit the criteria for RESPONSIBLE!  I only get to acknowledge 2!  Those others--keep it up! I appreciate you everyday that you come to school.  You make our classroom the most awesome place to learn!

Our Golden Eagle of the Day presentations for this month are nearing an end.  We have learned so much about each other and found that many of us have so much in common with so many others in our class.  Hopefully this will help students to find common ground and develop new friendships!  From a writer's perspective, it was an amazing time spent each day.  I can't wait to continue to transfer of those skills into students independent writing.  As for the next Golden Eagle of the Day topic, stay tuned.  I will introduce it to students this week and have them sign up for a day they feel they will be prepared and confident to present!

We completed our read aloud of The Night of the New Magicians this week.  It was an intense and exciting read and I loved hearing students sign and moan and groan when our read was done each day.  They begged me to read on!  Reading excitement is awesome!  In this book, we met Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Dr. Louis Pasteur and Gustave Eiffel.  Each of these men were great inventors, engineers and scientists.  We enjoyed learning a bit of history through the eyes of our young characters Jack and Annie.  The plan was to move along into a new read aloud expanding our horizons into new genre but students, of course, were sure that the author left us clues at the end of this book that we NEEDED to follow and find out for sure!  As you can see, they are starting to examine text for the author's larger purpose and craft.  They are becoming critical readers/listeners! These skills will transfer to their own independent reading over time!  They all scoured the many places we keep great books in the classroom and found the next in the series and have them piled up and ready to read.  I have set them off to read ahead on their own and see what they find out!  Even our reluctant readers are seeking out the book and trying to read it with their friends.  They have created their own 'book clubs'.

In math this week, we began to examine growing patterns-both number patterns and geometric.  We started with a problem about our student teacher's fence painting experience to see how they would naturally make sense of and record a pattern in context.  Then we looked at t-charts as effective ways to represent growing number patterns.  We explored growing patterns in various contexts for the rest of the week.

Grade 2 students finished up their diyas this week and finished looking at Diwali as a celebration celebrated by many around the world. They made rangoli art too!  Grade 2 students will go to Scientists in the Schools this week to learn about and experience simple machines. A great experience to bring context to the unit when we approach it in the classroom later on this year.
In science, we all began to research through images various biomes (desert, tropical rainforest, arctic, temperate forest and savannah). Using our new Apple TV we compared their similarities and differences through pic collage images students made together.  We brainstormed animals that are found in each and used words such as hibernation and camouflage when we realized that through images, most animals and plants found in various biomes tended to be the colours of the environments in which they lived.  We asked ourselves how that is helpful to their survival. We will use the word migration when we look at how plants and animals in each adapt to their surroundings in order to survive.  Students are in cross grade partners and will each choose a biome to research and report back to us.  We will use this opportunity to learn to use Google Slides through our new Google accounts as a presentation tool.  Our week ended looking at data from weather graphs.  We didn't know they were weather graphs however.  We just saw a graph and to reason our way around what it might be showing.  Students were quick to see mm and degrees C as scale labels and we realized the graph was about temperature and precipitation.  Next week we will match weather graphs to their biomes in order to think critically about what the experiences in those environments must be for the plants and animals there.

I have begun to post things of interest to students on the Google Classroom.  Most students seem able to access this from home already and those who can't, we are working on trouble shooting this as best as we can from school end.  If you can help, or need help please don't hesitate to contact me.

In the innovation studio, we began our Hour of Code. This is a pre-requisite to being able to code the various types of robots we have in our Innovation Studio.  Students can access Hour of Code to practice at home by going to www.code.org online.  When students finish Hour of Code, they are to print out certificates and bring them to school for me to post, celebrate and track!  Thanks.

Enjoy the day today!  Halloween is tomorrow and we will have a parade for those interested in participating tomorrow just before nutrition break.  Please send costumes to school.  Make up may be applied at home as this will be difficult for students to do on their own in the limited changing time we will have prior to the parade. After the parade, we will be spend time enjoying some science art!  Grade three students will make seed mosaics and grade 2 students will make sculptures for their life cycle project trioramas to partner with their life cycle projects. Will be like a party!

Update: October 24

Another busy week.  Last week we enjoyed our Pizza Party in celebration of winning the Terry Fox Fundraiser contest.  Our class raised the most money of ANY other class in the school.  Congrats and a big thank you to you for supporting such a worthwhile cause.  Cancer affects many of us and our families!  Thanks again for your support.

In science last week, we finished up our soil inquiry that we did collaboratively with Mrs. DeRivera's class.  We looked at the rate of absorption of 100ml of water, filled jars with 5 different types of soils and water and then shook them.  We waited patiently for them to settle and after a few days, we had a relook.  They had indeed settled and many different layers were visible within each type of soil. Some clearly had more sand, some clearly had more clay and others were quite equally distributed in their layers.  We learned about those layers were and how they affected water drainage.  It turns out the amount of sand in a soil type affects water absorption.  Students were then asked to choose a type of soil that they thought would be the best for planting an Eldorado garden and support their choice with reasons and evidence.  As expected students to be able to draw upon the various soil text that we had read, the hands on experiments we conducted, the conversations and investigations we did and combine those with their own predictions and thoughts to fully back up their choice.  Students also started to film their imovies using greenscreen technology.  They are turning out great.  As students finish up, I have been posting them on Seesaw for you to have a sneak peek! Enjoy.

Grade 3 students got use the pic collage app last week to make collages of plants that come from seeds, plants that come from shoots and plants that grow from bulbs.  Grade 2 students continued to work on their life cycle projects of the animal of their choice.  They were expected to read text, watch video, gather jot notes and collect research information.  They are just about finished their projects and move onto the habitat creation and plasticene sculpture of their animal.  Stay tuned.  I am sure that this group of grade 2 students will do an outstanding job of this piece of their project.

Our math focus continued to be on comparing and ordering large numbers but also on how we effectively communicate our thinking when we talk about or write about our work.  This will be an ongoing focus as it is important for student to effectively represent and communicate their strategies and ideas to others.  We came up with the following:
Our ideas should be relevant or related to the math problem
Our ideas should use a picture, word or symbols to partner or work together to explain
Our ideas should answer why? how? what?
Our ideas should be organized using charts, tables, titles, labels, diagrams or pictures, webs, lists, etc.
Our ideas should use colours or labels to clearly represent important information (not for art and pretty work!)

Our shared writing experiences through the Golden Eagle of the Day have been helping us develop ourselves (collectively) as very thoughtful writers. Students are moving beyond merely stating the objects and their importance and beginning to make connections, group things categorically and asking deep questions of the presenter so that they have some very interesting things to write about.  Aryan's paragraph saw students writing about how force affected the speed of his hot wheels car as well as how the angle of his cricket bat affected how the ball would be hit.  What a giant step from our very early paragraphs!  Overtime, students will begin to use these deeper, more critical thinking ideas in their own writing.  Students are also becoming very good editors.  They quickly realize when we are using certain words too repetitively or when our sentences are too simple.  Many times throughout the shared writing experience, students will say, "Can we go back and make a change in the second paragraph...." or "I notice we have used the word 'you' 7 times in only this paragraph.  I think we need to change some of them."  Wonderful talk comes from this daily experience.  

We will be beginning to form 'book clubs' with our peers (groups chosen by me!) as we work on developing various skills in our reading.  I will group students occasionally by reading level, occasionally by reading interest, occasionally by skill specific needs and occasionally just for FUN! We are working on developing ourselves as readers and look forward to big growth ahead.  Grade 3 students have just completed our first reading assessment  CASI.  This assessment was given to all grade 3 students at Eldorado and looked at their ability to read grade level text, retell main ideas, make connections and inferences.  These are new skills for them.  Many can discuss and think about these concepts but writing them down in coherent answers is difficult.  We will improve!  It was our first attempt.   Many of us are at the beginning stages of this but as a class we will graph our collective results, make criteria for each of those skill sets and set some goals for improvement through purposeful instruction and practice.  Students will play a big part in planning for this instruction and practice plan!  I find it is much more powerful when they see a gap, make a plan and follow through!  Stay tuned to this ongoing piece.

RAZ kids account information was sent home on Friday.  Your child may read or listen to ANY book within the app.  There is much value in reading at level material but also in listening to text about our interests or passions.  As a class, we work a lot on what skills we are developing as we read and how the skills that we are working on developing are different when we listen to reading by others.  This app will be used from time to time as homework.  I will assign particular books that will relate to concepts or skills to support or partner with our classroom learning.  Stay tuned.  

We are continuing our read aloud.  We are halfway done Night of the New Magicians.  We have met two of those 'magicians' already at the Paris World's Fair.  They are Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.  We are predicting that the other two magicians will also be scientists or inventors of some kind!  We will see..........

As always, if you have comments or questions, please feel free to contact me through the agenda, email or stop me on the tarmac!  We will have more formal meetings next month as we discuss your child's progress report.  Together we will use this time to discuss your child's learning skills, their classroom strengths and set some goals for moving forward.  I look forward to continuing that journey together.  

Dress warmly and enjoy the week ahead!
Mrs. Cooke

Weekly update: October 14 A Long Post!

It was a busy week in Portable 1 again this week!  Okay...I am sure each post will start with that.  I am sure that EVERY week is going to be a busy one in our classroom.  We do A LOT of work each day!  Grab a cold drink, a cup of coffee or tea and maybe a snack.  Sit back and enjoy the update of our learning this week!

We have started uploading a few things into our Seesaw portfolios.  The QR code to access your child's portfolio was sent home today in the agenda.  It is our hope to post some reading, writing, math, science events in there occasionally so that you can see what kinds of things YOUR child is producing in class.  Enjoy the updates from your child.

In math this week, we continued to use a variety of mental math strategies to add and subtract large numbers ( 2 and 3 digit numbers) as well as using open number lines to order and compare numbers. Students made connections this week when we were looking at number lines and created a number line with numbers and then connected that concept to time and so we put the correlated times onto a number line.  From there they noticed the connection between money too!  So, of course, we put the corresponding money amounts onto a number line as well.  The conversation was about why the half way point between 5 and 6 the number 51/2 but the halfway point between 5:00 and 6:00 was 5:30 and yet the halfway point between $5.00 and $6.00 was $5.50.  They came up with that 30 was half of 60 minutes but 50 was half of a dollar.  It was an important discovery!  Connections and relationships are always important things for us to think about in math.  The other important discovery was that just because numbers are not explicitly written on a number line doesn't mean that they don't exist.  Even between consecutive numbers there are numbers (fractional parts).  In math, we are also working on clearly representing and communicating our thinking and reasoning across all strands in math. These are skills we will continue ALL YEAR long!  Answers are not as important to us as thinking and reasoning strategies.

In language, grade 2 students have been working hard on turning jot note information into clear, coherent sentences and paragraphs.  We have developed paragraphs for each of the animal groups: mammals, reptiles, birds, fish and amphibians.  A number of students are trying to use the strategies we use in writing our shared paragraphs for Golden Eagle of the Day in their daily writing.  Grade 3 students have been working on reading informational text about plants and soils.  They have been practising finding evidence to support their answers from the text and writing in complete, coherent sentences. Grade 3 students are also working on writing their own scripts for their photosynthesis cooking shows that they will produce using greenscreen and imovie technology.  We will invite you to a red carpet movie viewing in the near future.   Grade 2 students will begin a life cycle research project next week.

Our read aloud is from the Magic Treehouse collection yet again.  We finished up Monday With a Mad Genius about Leonardo daVinci and are now reading Night of the New Magicians.  I cannot reveal the 'New Magicians' as we are still making predictions as we read.  We are only on chapter 3 and still very curious about who Jack and Annie are looking for at the Paris World's Fair in 1889.

Our Golden Eagle presentations have lead to mini lessons on capitalization of proper nouns, possessive s, using connector words to turn simple sentences into more complex sentences.  We have started to include some personal connections woven throughout the paragraphs about our Golden Eagles and realize that when we do that it bumps our writing up to a new, more complex level.  We continue to work on choral reading for fluency and pacing as we read aloud together.

In science, grade 3's continue to work on soil while grade 2 students are looking at sorting and classifying animal groupings.  We were all enjoying the great outdoors while the weather is nice to work through some life science topics.  Next week, we will work together on adaptations of plants and animals in a variety of biomes as well as the positive and negative effects of human actions on plants and animals.  We will use a variety of fiction and non fiction text to investigate these topics. They will lead to some persuasive writing by both grade levels in the near future.

OTHER NEWS:
1.Our fish have had more babies and we are no longer saving them and putting them into the nursery net.  It is a lesson on nature: no one in nature goes around saving baby animals in the wild. They must come with their own defenses to protect themselves or their babies like speed, camouflage, shelter, etc.  Stay tuned.  We will see what happens in the tank!
2. A few students acted as a construction crew this week and put together a shoe rack for us at the back of the coat rack.  I gave them the box and left them to it.  They had to figure out the pieces, follow the directions and work together.  GREAT JOB GUYS!  Our indoor and outdoor shoes were all over the place, causing a tripping hazard and looking like a mess.  We now have a beautiful little shoe rack and the back of our coat rack looks sooooo much better.  Thanks to the 3 students who put that together for us this week!

3. Library book exchange will always be on a Friday.  Music and Gym change up based on the day--I will send home a schedule soon as our whole schedule did just change and we are still getting used to the changes.
4. WE WON THE TERRY FOX PIZZA PARTY.  This will be at second nutrition break on Monday.

Enjoy the weekend ahead.  The weather is supposed to be great.  Looking forward to next week as we delve into things a little deeper in all areas of the curriculum.

Class Curriculum Update October 4

We have been very busy on many, many skills this week. In math, we continue to work on constructing and deconstructing numbers in various contexts.  We find it useful to deconstruct numbers when we want to make numbers more 'friendly' to mentally add or subtract them, it is also helpful as we want to make balanced equations.  We are working on balancing equations in various contexts as well.  In math, we also continue to work with the idea that a number is merely a digit without value until we assign it value.  For example, in the number 43, the 4 is not a '4' at all but really a 40.  We practice this idea with 2 digit, 3 digit and 4 digit numbers as we play a variety of class games and use the appropriate value when we share our strategies to communicate our thinking in math.  Our Terry Fox Fundraiser has also given us great opportunities to add money amounts in real contexts.  We were also adding and looking at our totals and posing interesting interesting questions about the total such as, "How much more money would we need to get to the next 10?"

In language, we are working on organizing our ideas into main ideas and supporting details using brainstorm webs with multiple levels.  We use a web daily as we organize the details about the items the Golden Eagle of the day brings in, we use them to organize details about science topics we are learning about (plants/soils in grade 3 and animal group characteristics in grade 2). We are using Shared Writing daily to generate and model how to use the topics, main ideas and details into organized, interesting and cohesive paragraphs through the Golden Eagle of the Day project.  WE use the hamburger model to remind us of what is included in an organized, effective paragraph.  Each day, we generate paragraphs together as a class and pick out a few grammar, writing skills to focus on daily.  During Himmat's paragraph, we grapled with the overuse of words (both repeated in sentence after sentence and beginning too many sentences in the same way).  We also began to look at introduction and conclusion sentences.  Trying to gently tell the reader that we are changing topics without being so obvious (i.e. Now we are going to talk about his third item....)  In Aroosha's paragraph, we looked at 's' at the ends of words. Why did some words require an apostrophe s ('s) and others required only a plain 's'.  We figured out that the apostrophe meant belonging to and the plain s was plural or more than one.   We continued work on the same skills as in Himmat's and apply those ideas to Aroosha's paragraph today too!  After doing this together for each student, many of those writing skills will/should become habit for your little writer in his/her daily independent writing!  

We continue to work on independent and partner reading as well as listening to reading.  Each of those areas require and work on very different skill sets.  We are practising being purposeful learners.  When we are aware of what we should be practising or doing or learning while we work, we often are much better at putting effort into the right areas.  Your child's reading log and response journal also came home today.  If you have any questions about that please contact me through email or agenda and we can chat about that program. 

Exciting events in our portable this week included the addition of some baby fish to our aquarium.  On Sunday night or Monday morning, our guppies had babies and I came in Monday morning to teeny, tiny baby fish trying desperately to hide from the adults.  Sadly, they are so small and so transparent that they get mistaken by adult fish as food flakes and often get eaten.  I quickly rescued 5 or 6 of them and seperated them into a baby nursery net for safety.  We are enjoying watching those!  We also added 2 new bright orange baby platy fish to our tank today thanks to a former student who has a home aquarium and too many new babies in it!  Thanks to Mysha!

Science topics this week are all about living things. The grade 3 students are working on major parts of plants and their functions and all about soil.  The grade 2 students are working on classification of animal groups and beginning to look at life cycles (obviously we started with fish since the class aquarium so nicely presented that in context opportunity).  These topics will continue through October as we use a variety of picture book literature such as the Lorax and The Great Kapok Tree to look at the impact of human actions on animal and plant species and the interaction between those two.  Stay tuned! 

Hope you find the updates useful and informative.  Like I said, we are ALWAYS very busy learners in Portable 1 and I hope to share even a glimmer of what that looks like for your student through this blog.