February 21-24

Upcoming Important Dates:

• March 9/10: Student Led Conferences (no school 10th)
• March 24-April 3: Spring Break 
• April 7: Good Friday (no school)
• April 13: Easter Monday (no school)

Opening Task: Literacy & Math Routines

We have been practicing a new morning routine that challenges us to complete literacy and numeracy tasks such as word scrambles or addition problems. This week we unscrambled words with the ai vowel combination and solved greater than/less than math problems. Here are some photos of our work! We are excited to show you more at Student Led Conferences. 

Writer's Workshop: Weekend Writing & Reflection in Me Writing

We have been learning about sentence structure and applying what we've learned to simple writing tasks such as weekend writing. Students are challenged to include capitalization, punctuation, subjects, nouns and verbs (as needed) throughout their sentences. Grade 2s have an additional challenge to add interesting detail to their writing by asking WHAT, WHO, WHERE, WHEN, WHY, HOW questions throughout their sentence writing. Check our some of our writing samples and the exemplar/non-exemplar below!

                 

               

We read the story "Reflection in Me" by Peter H. Reynolds and took some time to reflect about what we love in ourselves. We brainstormed things that we love that we CAN do, things that we ARE, and things that we HAVE. The kids shared and wrote some BEAUTIFUL ideas!

Math: Word Problems & CUBES

Students have been practicing applying addition strategies to word problems! Using the CUBES strategy as a guide to comprehending and completing word problems, we have learned that not all numbers are important in some word problems and it is important to use two strategies to solve for the right answer! Check out some of our work below! 

Pink Shirt Day

 

Hello Families! I hope you've all stayed safe and warm in this winter wonderland. I wanted to remind you all that tomorrow is Pink Shirt Day! Pink Shirt Day honours an anti-bullying initiative created by 2 young students in Nova Scotia (2007) who were supporting a peer that was bullied for wearing a pink shirt to school. Students at LBS will participate in a variety of activities surrounding themes of Kindness and Friendship while learning more about this important day. Please feel free to send your student wearing pink if you have it and if you don't, that is okay too! :)

       

February 1-10

 

Upcoming Important Dates:

• February 14: Valentine's Day 
• Our class will not be handing out class wide Valentine's in an effort to reduce our ecological footprint and paper use. We are instead doing a Secret Valentine Project which we are all super excited for! This will be organized in class. :) 
• February 15: 100th Day of School 
• Join us in celebration for the 100th Day of School by dressing up on theme! 
• February 15: Family Dance 
• Please see notice sent home with details. 
• February 16-17: Teacher's Convention (no school) 
• February 20: Family Day (no school)

Writing & Wellness: Colour Monster Writing 

As a way to explore and discuss our emotions, we completed another Writer's Workshop based off the mentor text titled The Colour Monster! Students then chose an emotion and a correlating colour to write about. We were challenged to use similes and write about a memory to enhance the interest of our writing. Finally, we designed our own monsters and got to paint them with water colour paint! Check out some of our work below: 

Math: Addition & Word Problems 

Room 12 can use addition strategies! We've been investigating and practicing a variety of strategies to add numbers together. Grade 1s are focussing primarily on number combinations to 20 while Grade 2s are focussing on number combinations to 100. Some even beyond 100! 

Learning new math games makes adding fun and also teaches us really cool math concepts like commutative property and inverse relationships between operations! 

Word Work: Digraphs Continued

We've continued learning about digraphs and have started to challenge ourselves to apply them to our spelling when we are building words or writing in our journals! Some new digraphs we have learned in February are: PH, NG, and GH. We explored these new digraphs specifically mostly as readers and will continue to learn about them in Grades 1-2 before we are expected to include them in our writing/spelling. 

Family Literacy Day at LBS!

 

                                         

Please view the link to see some fantastic and fun literacy games that you can play at home!

Family Friendly Literacy Games

January 16-20

 Upcoming Dates:

• Tuesdays: Library Day
• Please ensure Library Books are sent home so your kiddo can get their new books!
• January 26: Fun Lunch 
• January 27: Family Literacy Day 
• Please see information below. 
• February 3: PD Day (no school) 
• February 16-17: Teacher's Convention (no school) 
• February 20: Family Day (no school)

Home Reading

I hope you all enjoyed the first week of Home Reading! The kids were SO excited to take books home to share and read with you. Please note that we encourage the kids to self-select books that are a good fit for them and this may take some time for them to be able to do with increased independence and accuracy. We are also asking that students try to keep their books for a minimum of three days in order to really practice the books they have. This time frame will also help our teachers and volunteers keep the Home Reading book baskets organized and replenished as much as possible. 

Word Work: Digraphs

This week we learned about and practiced a variety of digraphs. Digraphs are two letters that, when combined, make a whole new sound. We learned that they can be found in the beginning, middle or ending of words and went on word hunts to add to our Digraph Dictionary! 

Helpful Digraph Videos:

Th: https://youtu.be/V-cvlZLNEBM 

Sh: https://youtu.be/eqigJZm5aa4

Ch: https://youtu.be/8JmCrl4FHj8

Wh: https://youtu.be/TBA-R3Sx1Pc

Social Studies: Seven Sacred Teachings & Medicine Wheel

This week we went deeper into our exploration of the Four Sacred Medicines and the Seven Sacred Teachings. Students learned about the creation, purpose and sharing of these teachings by looking at maps, stories, and participating in class discussions. Ask your kiddo about how the Seven Sacred Teachings found in Indigenous cultures and practices can be used in our daily life and communities! They might be able to speak to our growing documentation board (see below!) 

Math: Number Talks, Thinking Routines & Games

In Grade 1/2 it is very important to build foundational number sense, fact fluency, and mathematical vocabulary. To develop these skills, we have been participating in Number Talks, Thinking Routines and continued our routine of playing math games. Here are some examples of what types of warm ups or cool downs we've been doing in math! 

Number Talks: Esti-Mysteries by Steve Wyborney 

https://stevewyborney.com/2022/10/170-new-esti-mysteries/ 

Thinking Routines 

Math Games 

 

Family Literacy Day

January 9-13

 

Important Upcoming Dates: 

• Tuesdays: Library Day
• Please ensure Library Books are sent home so your kiddo can get their new books!
• January 26: Fun Lunch 
• February 3: PD Day (no school) 
• February 16-17: Teacher's Convention (no school) 
• February 20: Family Day (no school)

Math: Number Lines & Number Bonds 

We learned that we can use number lines to count, skip count and to order numbers before and after one another. We will be learning how to add on a number line! 

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Number Bonds are like fact families! It is a way that we can decompose numbers using the part-part-whole strategy. This strategy is used in Grade 1/2 for addition and subtraction and will also be used later in elementary school for multiplication and division fact families. 

Social Studies: Four Sacred Medicines 

Inquiry: Snowflakes

We continued our exploration of Snowflakes this week by looking at the Life Cycle of a Snowflake. We also challenged ourselves to find at least twenty words that we can make out of the word: s-n-o-w-f-l-a-k-e. It was so fun! Ask your kiddo what words they were able to discover. Next week we will be looking into descriptive words using in stories about snow as well as more about the season Winter.