October 2, 2017

Well, September has certainly flown by! Thankfully we had great weather for most of it. Thank you for bringing the children to their Strong Beginnings appointments, and for your support of our Terry Fox Run. This month we are finishing up our Walkathon fundraiser, which provides all of our students with greater resources along with learning and social opportunities that make our school so amazing! Throughout this month,  learning activities will include Thanksgiving and Halloween themes and concepts, including our pumpkin carving mentioned at Meet the Teacher, whose date is TBD at the moment.

MATH

October's focus will be around building understanding and confidence with number concepts such as:

• skip counting forwards and backwards, how skip counting is also a strategy for addition and subtraction, 
• how numbers can be broken into their place value units and use this as a strategy for addition and subtraction. 

They are currently working with concrete materials to scaffold  their learning. We are also in the middle of exploring patterns, including repeating, growing, and shrinking patterns which will wrap up sometime this month.

Language Arts

September and October writing is a time of observing their strengths and struggles, and building their stamina and confidence to write their thoughts, perspectives, opinions, and questions as a means of building and consolidating their learning as well as communicate that understanding. Through the weekly This week at school writing you will have the chance to see what they are understanding in their learning, observe their printing and writing skills, and encourage and guide them to achieve academic goals we will be setting together at Conferences in two weeks.

This Monday, the Home Reading program will begin. These very first books are a gentle introduction to daily reading at home and as the children become more confident in their skills and selective in their reading material, I urge you to simply listen to/help them read the book and complete the reflection page, thus providing positive reading experiences which is a key factor in reading success.

Social Studies

In September we have focused on our families, which are really our first community. Thank you for the photos of their houses, you will see how we used them as an art project within the Community theme. This month we will be expanding our sense of community to the city of  Winnipeg, considering factors such as services, goods, transportation, culture, resources, and comparing/contrasting these factors to rural communities.

Science

We will begin exploring matter and materials in Science this month. This encompasses the concepts of solids, liquids, and gases, and how these relate to the materials we use in our everyday lives.

Technology

We had our first class on the computers last Thursday and the children did very well. They were able to sign into the divisional computers, and then use Microsoft Edge to get to Xtramath.org and begin developing their understanding and automatic recall of simple math facts. Information went home in their agenda this week on how you can get them logged in at home if you like.

This week I will be trying to get more of their initial work into their SeeSaw portfolio, so we have it to use in setting learning goals during conferences.