Happy December everyone!
With December comes a busy month of concert rehearsals and concerts! Students and teachers work very hard to put on special shows and performances for you to enjoy. Please come out to watch your child perform for you and our community on December 8th. Our whole class is performing a variety of numbers (dance, recorder, etc.) along with various choirs and bands from the older students. A few students from our class who are in the Pebbles Choir are also performing on Dec. 15 in the evening at that concert.
With December also comes the promise of a well deserved winter break. We will be at school this month right until the 23rd of December. Aside from concerts and rehearsals, we will continue to be busy with MANY learning adventures....as usual for this group of awesome, eager learners!!!!
If you are going to be away on an extended vacation, please check the blog, your child's seesaw account and our Twitter account for details about what we are doing. While away, it is a great idea to take along some reading material for your child. Daily reading is important. Another great idea, is to have your child keep his/her own version of a blog/journal/trip diary. A great platform that ALL of our students are familiar with using is Google Slides. They can create various slides over the course of your trip and include digital images and documentation about his/her trip and the adventures you take together as a family. Your child can present this to the class upon their return or he/she can just share the document with me to view and discuss with them. Family trips and family experiences are important! Reading and writing are important too! Why not combine them?
Probably the most exciting learning your child has come home to talk about is our EV3 Robot building and programming experiences this past week. Students followed a procedure to build their own J-Bot and then learned about programming it to do basic moves like move forward, move backward and turn. This led to lots of fun creating mazes and programming the robots to go through the maze without crashing through walls! From there, we moved onto learning about the input sensors that our Ev3 robots can have as attachments. On Friday, we started building and attaching the touch sensors. We will program with that input sensor on Monday. Over the course of the week, we may get to build, attach and try out the other types as well. Exciting coding plans this week too!
In math, we continued with 2 dimensional geometry. We learned about angles, parallel lines, congruent shapes etc. We worked with those ideas and played with those ideas using geoboards, cut out shapes, dot paper, pattern blocks and other math tools. Throughout the week, we sorted and categorized our shapes many ways. We are moving to naming attributes and properties and learning how they differ in the upcoming days and week. At the end of the week, we collaborated with Mrs. DeRivera's class (3E) on a problem solving task involving Venn Diagrams. Students were shown 3 types of Venn diagrams and we are learning how each type of different and used for different types of sorting rules and purposes. This was a VERY difficult task for many, many students. Therefore, we will work with Venn Diagrams this week of all kinds to learn and practice more about how to use them effectively to represent our sorting rules. After a lot of Venn diagram practice, we will return to the cut out shapes and try again to sort them different ways using each of the 3 Venn diagrams.
In language, we worked a lot on our retelling skills. In doing so, we got to read many awesome texts...some graphic texts (comics in your mind) and regular fiction texts. We are getting very good at picking out the important information in a fiction text to include in a retell of a story. Independently, we did one on the book the Great Kapok Tree to use as a comparison to our next independent one by the end of this week. We used shared writing to do some together and group writing to do a few others. Our first group task, was to work in a group of 6 who read a text together. 2 were assigned the beginning, 2 the middle and 2 the end to complete a retell. The groups were not allowed to communicate with the other groups on other parts of their story. We used it like a puzzle and put the pieces together to see if the retell made sense to the audience. The audience listened and then retold what they understood the story to be about before each story being read aloud to them. After the read aloud, students brainstormed what important information had been left out of the group's retell. We listened and used that feedback to try again another day with a new group. This time, a group of 3. One student each responsible for a piece (beg, mid, end). The groups will present their retell on Monday and Tuesday to the audience. We will then move to doing another independent retell later this week to see how we do now that we have criteria and practice in those skills! Stay tuned!
We will be finishing up our science units this week and then be moving onto a social studies unit that will take us well into the new year with new learning. We will be going on a field trip the week before winter break to Crawford Lake to connect some of our classroom learning with some real first hand experiences.
Eldorado had some great presentations this week.
1. Anthony McLean came to do an anti-bullying presentation.
WITS
when dealing with others:
WALK away,
IGNORE them,
TALK it out,
SEEK HELP!
In that order!!!!!! Many students' first reaction is to run and get a teacher to deal with a situation between friends. Please have discussions with your child about using their WITS! It will certainly help them to be more independent problem solvers in dealing with peers. Thank you.2. Grade 2 students attended a presentation by the Toronto Zoo on the Great Lakes and the habitats of the plants and animals that live there.
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