September 13-17th

Our first full week together was a busy one continuing on our path of learning about our identity, developing connections around what feeds and balances our heart, spirit, mind and body along with continuing to develop our sense of belonging in our learning spaces and to one another. Over the week, students were also immersed in learning more about Terry Fox, his legacy and his role as a hero in Canadian history and participated in our school's Terry Fox Run. 

Some other areas of focus over the last couple weeks include:

*Reviewing letter names and letter sounds (this will continue to do so in the upcoming weeks).  This foundational work will be very important as we work towards reading with accuracy and fluency.  So far we have reviewed the letters S, A, T, P, I, N, C, K. 

*Building number sense - modelling and describing numbers through pictures, manipulatives, and symbols. 

*Patterns - identifying the nature of what makes a pattern, creating their own patterns and extending patterns. Vocabulary we have centered our learning around: repeats, core, term. 

Here is a snapshot of one of our learning tasks over the past weeks:

I can share personal experiences and my understanding of language related to shared texts. I can use a variety of forms of text (drawings, labels, sentences, oral language) to share my ideas.

We began by reading our school's anchor text, The Tree in Me by Corinna Luyken and explored the ways we are like trees - strong, connected to others and nature and resilient. From there we discussed what we knew about trees from a more scientific lens(types, shapes, and parts of a tree). Students were then challenged to imagine themselves as a tree and create a visual in the form of a drawing which represented themselves as a tree. They were prompted with questions such as 

• what kind of tree are you?
• what shape?
• do you have needles or leaves?
• do you bear fruits or cones?
• do you provide a home for others?
• are you in a community of trees?
• consider how your roots grow, how your trunk bends and forms,  and the direction your branches. 

We also focussed on our 4 star picture rubric to help guide students when creating their pictures. After sharing our pictures and ideas orally with each other we then moved onto writing sentences using the sentence starter, I am like a tree because..