TWAS November 10th

Hello Everyone,

I hope that you are all off to a great weekend start!

Some of you were able to join us for our Remembrance Day ceremony and see first hand how committed your children were to this event.  They have been working so hard on their performances and wanted to make our special guests proud.  They certainly succeeded, I would say!

In addition to today’s ceremony we have been having conversations about the significance of Remembrance Day, and symbols such as the poppy.  The children learned how to tea stain paper for an antique look and how to ‘paint with water.’ They then combined these techniques to create beautiful water colour poppies that sit, over ‘antiqued’ Flanders Fields poems.  Doves that carry messages of peace  were written by the children and accompany these beautiful art pieces. Our class wreath is a multi-medium compilation, created from mostly recycled materials.   They were a little tricky to make, but wow they turned out beautifully (pictures below).  

This week in social studies we started to discuss legacy, and the types of belongings that family may pass along.  We will be continuing with this conversation, and the children are invited to bring in objects (or pictures of objects) that hold significant meaning to their families.  They were also very excited to learn that our class was chosen, out of hundreds, to experience a very special visit to Niitsitapi Learning Center.  In preparation for our visit we will be spending some time reflecting on and responding to the following questions:  who are we and how does where we are from influence who we are?

We are continuing to expand our math skills, working with the number line and exploring our understandings of number relationships on the number line.  The children are becoming proficient at making number connections, and working to ensure that their work is presented neatly, so as not to cause confusion as they work through equations and word problems.

There has been so much writing, reading and little people declarations of “I love math” that I am constantly amazed by the students’ enthusiasm, energy and learning endurance.  Likewise they continue to support and care for each other in the classroom and beyond.  As we move into the middle of November, I am so pleased with everyone’s contribution to our shared learning space and individual commitments to learning.  Thank you parents, and extended family, for all you do to support your children’s learning.

I’ll sign off with a final note from Ms. Thomas:

Artist of the Week:

The Ramones:

The Ramones almost single-handedly invented what we now know, as “punk rock”. Originally made up of Joey, Tommy, Dee Dee, and Johnny, each member adopted the surname “Ramone”. This name came from Paul McCartney who used to use the surname to check into hotels at the peak of his fame. Their musical style consisted of 60s bubble-gum pop, beach boys melodies, and chain saw guitar chord progressions. We will be using the Ramones as a spring board to explore the influence that punk had on pop music. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TWAS

Image
Hello Everyone, I hope you are all off to a wonderful weekend start! It was lovely to meet with so many families over the last week during our community walk, picnic and at 'meet the teacher.' As the children settle into their routines we are finding our days whizzing by and the children's morning endurance seems to be strengthening daily. We will start rotating through math stations next week so we spent quite a bit of time working with math problems, as they tend to be the math station that requires the most "mastery" (mastery was our circle of courage focus this week; please ask your little one to explain his/her understanding of this tricky concept). The children are learning to be patient with themselves as they learn the skill of breaking down math problems and using their tools to work with the information they are given. I was impressed with their ability to recall the many strategies that they learned last year, and the ways that they applied these ...
Read more

TWAS

Image
Hello Everyone, Wow what a wild, fast and wonderful week!  The days flew by and already the children are in the thick of leaning.  One of us stated, at the beginning of TWAS, "Mrs. McArthur what can we even write about; we've only been here four days," and then they proceeded to fill up three pages with the week's events.  So here is some of what was on those pages: We began the week with activities and discussions that focused on belonging.  Where we see it, why we need it, when we feel it, when we don't and why it is so important in our class and out in the community. We also talked a bit about our class rule:  kindness.  I will let them explain why we only need one rule, how everything (even signing out for the bathroom) relates back to kindness. On this path we also set up our Circle of Courage and began our recognition of Random Acts of Kindness, of which we saw many this week. Additionally we dove right in to our language arts, math, inquiry, ar...
Read more

TWAS April 27

Hello Everyone, I hope you are all enjoying the amazing weather!! I'm sorry to report that with clubs, assembly and finishing up tasks we completely ran out of time for quotes.  The children all did write and bring home their TWAS letters. The weather was so beautiful that we were able to enjoy much of our math outside this week.  We rotated through stations, addition and subtraction regrouping with chalk on the compound; graphing the compound geometric shapes, chalk drawings of geometric shapes and building structures with 3D objects.  The children also independently completed the following 2 math problems (all grade 2's completed the same problems and 73 did very well): Our class had 27 pencils and then Mr. Scout gave us 18 more.  How many pencils do we have now? I have 24 marbles. Some are blue, some are red, some are white. There are two more blue marbles than white. What combinations of marbles could I have? ...
Read more