TWAS November 24th

Hello Everyone,

I hope you are all enjoying this amazing November weather!  It certainly made for some nice recesses.

As the children may of shared with you, I was absent this morning but when I returned for the afternoon PD, I was so pleased to walk into our classroom and find a huge note from the guest teacher saying how enjoyable her morning was and that the children made her feel so very welcome.  Way to go 73; you really are a beautiful group of kind and thoughtful people :)  I also head that they enjoyed a fantastic live band performance, and that clubs went very well.  I'll let them elaborate on that.

We have been doing a lot of work with the writing process.   Learning to brainstorm, organize and transition through ideas and engage with audience. Our goal over the last two weeks has been to spend Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday organizing and planning for a piece of writing, then put it all together into an organized reflection on Thursdays.  The children have each chosen their own specific targets and I was extremely impressed with the efforts everyone is putting in. The last two weeks have been focused on reflective writing and next week we will be moving into descriptive writing . . . with a fun parent challenge at the end. More to come on that :)

This week in math we started to look at coin money.  See if your little ones can name the Canadian coins, tell you how many cents each is worth and what picture is found on each.  We also played around with different ways to pay for something using coins. For example if I wanted to by a popsicle that cost 1 dollar and 30 cents, what different ways could I pay?  We are also doing a lot of math warm up.  We call it math toss:  I through a beach ball and math equation (verbally) at them, they answer and fire the ball back at me.  As you can probably imagine, they love this.  We are working with doubles to 9, and addition facts to 10.  They were also doing this activity with a partner (though more gently and with bean bags).  It would be a fun and fast math game to try at home, if you have time.  We will be doing a lot more of that to come, and next week focusing on the subtraction version.

Our science 'bug' inquiries' are wrapping up, and are really coming together quite well.  As I am sure you can imagine, inquiry is a skill that takes a lot of practice, but for our first attempt the final results are looking quite good.  We also continued our work with colour, focusing on warm/cold/contrasting colours.  They have grabbed onto these concepts brilliantly and we began our experiments with these concepts Thursday, making some really cool contrast art.  The beautiful/skillful colour wheels that the children created are pictured below, and our most recent art project should be finished for next week's TWAS post.

Socials has been "all about me" focused this week, as we continue to look at ideas of who we are.  The story of Sitting Bull's childhood name Slow continues to guide us as we discuss and reflect about the actions, and perspectives that help design and define us and we grow and evolve, and how these things contribute to family and our greater community. We have a very insightful group in room 73!

We had the curling residency at Cranston this week — so fun!!  I'll let the children tell you all about it. They have certificates of program completion in their blue communication folders. Because of the way that the gym schedule was re-formatted to work with curling, we were able to fit in some health lessons, looking at the four food groups, the importance of exercise and our mental health. We had some fun at a variety of stations learning about some strategies to help with stress, and got in that needed exercise with some field laps and yoga.

Yes it was a fun packed wildly fast week.  I hope the children are now enjoying some fun family time.  They work so hard!

I'll leave you with Ms. Thomas's weekly music message and wish you all a wonderful restful weekend!

Artist of the Week

Miles Davis:

For our first jazz artist of the year, we will be looking at trumpeter/composer, Miles Davis. We will be talking about his influence while we explore the overall genre, tying in other greats such as John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and many more. 


All created using only the three primary colours: Yellow, blue and red



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