Thanks to everyone who sent delicious snacks, fun games, and magnificent costumes for our Halloween party this week. We had a great time, and I hope that your Halloweens were full of lots of fun!
We’ve been reading and writing poetry this month in Language Arts, and wrote a variety of different types of poetry this past week. The students worked hard to make interesting word choices and tried to paint pictures in their readers’ minds. They are very proud of their variety of poems, and you can see more of your child's poetry on Seesaw!
2B was a flurry of building and experimenting this past week as we built and unveiled our magnetic devices for our grade one buddies. It was neat to see the variety of ways in which magnets can be used practically, and the students did some excellent scientific problem-solving in the creating of their devices. The highlight was when the grade one students visited our class to test out our creations. Needless to say, the students of 1V had lots of fun with all the toys and games! Check out the video above to see the students’ creations.
We learned more about adjectives today as we prepare to write Halloween poetry this week! The students especially enjoyed describing themselves (mostly accurately) with adjectives to create an adjective frame for their own face, and watching the "Paint the Way" video below. We've certainly got a colourful group of students!  Our classmate Aiden is one of our Saskatoon experts in 2B as we learn about prairie communities in Canada this year. Last weekend he was in Saskatoon, and his family very thoughtfully brought back some Saskatoon jam for us! The students loved learning more about the berry that Saskatoon gets its name from, and even moreso loved the tasty treat from Aiden's family!
We were lucky to have the gymnastics equipment set up at Millgrove this week, and the students really enjoyed practicing different gymnastics skills and learning from the gymnastics pro Mrs. C! We'll be even more ready for gymnastics at the Aerials Gymnastics Club in a few weeks!
We've been working on estimating in Math this week, including talking about how our estimates need to be informed and logical but not perfect, using referents (a smaller group of objects) to make an accurate estimate, and comparing our estimates to our counts. We also used skip counting strategies to more accurately and efficiently large groups of items. There are some great number sense and estimating gurus in our class!
We’ve started coding in our class, which means that we’re telling a computer, app, phone, or website what we want it to do. This week we used an app called Lightbot and a some robots named Dash and Dot to practice our skills in communicating, solving complex problems, and thinking logically and critically. The class found designing repeating patterns using Dash and Dot especially fun! As this CBC article reports, "Today, computing is involved in almost all aspects of our lives, from communications and education to social media, banking, information, security and shopping. Networked computers are capable of controlling our homes’ thermostats and lighting, our cars and our health records... Computational thinking allows preschoolers to grasp concepts like algorithms, recursion and heuristics—even if they don’t understand the terms, they’ll learn the basic concepts." I had the privilege of working with Dr. Cathy Adams at the U of A on some research during my Education degree, and she was recently interviewed here and here about coding in our new curriculum, saying: ""This is not about raising a generation of coders, but about educating a new generation of creative, engaged and ethical citizens who are able to understand, participate and critically evaluate the new digital landscapes that we are increasingly working, playing and living in." You can read more about the thinking behind students being exposed to coding here, and we will keep you updated on our further adventures in coding!
We've been busy with numbers up to 100 recently in Math, whether we were skip counting with money (a big highlight), investigating even and odd numbers, counting toothpicks like Raymond from Rain Man, and using ordinal numbers to describe objects (such as first, second, 3rd, 4th). The students were expert money counters, and felt quite prepared to spend their pretend money! If you'd like more practice at home with numbers to 100, the linked games below are focused on some of our learner outcomes for this unit.
In Science this week, we explored different magnets’ north and south poles, which materials are transparent to the magnetic force, different magnetic devices, and examined magnetic fields. The students enjoyed making a temporary magnet with a nail, and used various devices to view the effects of invisible magnetic fields. Stay tuned for our upcoming magnetic device project! |
Mrs. BarkerMrs. Barker is a grade two teacher at Millgrove School. She loves science and reading, and lives in a little brick house with Mr. Barker and her kids Jack and Ellie. 
Archive
October 2018
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
