Learning Highlights (Jan. 13-30)

Dear Parents,

Literacy
Since returning to school at the beginning of January the students have continued to work on developing their ability to read and write effectively. We have read numerous books about the season of winter which have certainly coincided with the extreme cold we experienced earlier in the month. Some of the book titles have included "The Mitten, Three Snow Bears, The Hat, A Very Special Snowflake and The Mitten Tree." Special attention has been placed on the Elements of Story (Setting, Characters, Plot, Climate and Retelling). Our focus of writing has been trying to write more complex sentences with extra attention to the use of descriptive words. Picture prompts have been presented and the students have tried to write about the setting using the five senses.

         

During Literacy Week we were fortunate to have Ms. Dalton and Constable Mark visit us. Constable Mark showed us all of the tools (flashlight, badge, taser, gun and notepad) he has to wear every day. It was very special having different people in our community read to us.

I can't forget to send out hugs and a huge thank you to Holly, Jasper, Enna and Asher who worked so hard on the video we made of the story, "I Got Two Dogs," for the Literacy Assembly (and Mrs. Dreyer for helping us as well)!!!

Numeracy
The students have been working on addition using different strategies (i.e. doubles, doubles plus 1, counting on by 1,2, making 10) and we have just begun trying to learn how addition and subtraction are related. Ms. Lana Pavlova (Math Specialist) engaged in a Part/Part/Whole lesson with us on Tuesday, January 28th and we are very much looking forward to her next visit. Her lesson was a very good introduction to the way addition and subtraction are linked.

We also engaged in some math where we created a code using the letters in the title of the story, "The Mitten Tree." It was a fun way to practice our basic addition facts and it also helped us with our spelling of high frequency words at the same time.

Science
We have been learning about Hot and Cold. The students have been working on a Creative Journal page about hot and cold items, creating webs and writing sentences about the many different weather words (thermometer, temperature, hot, cold, chilly, warm, snow, ice, storm, freezing, melting, degrees, Celsius, Fahrenheit, just to name a few). They also just finished graphing the high temperatures for the month of January. Two colours were used to show temperatures that were above and below zero. I was pleased to see that a few of the Grade 2 students were reminded of the number line when they saw the graph.