RamsayRowland

September 26- 29th This week was packed with some important learning to honor and raise awareness around Orange Shirt Day/National Truth and Reconciliation. Our work, this week was to develop an understanding about how in the past, Indigenous children and their families were forced to give up who they were to fit in yet never truly belonged. Through literature, oral stories and discussions we took action and steps to learn, connect and take a stand toward reconciliation. One story we centered our work around was  Nicola Campbell’s book  Shi-Shi-Etko  as it is gentle way to discuss Residential schools.  This beautiful story is about the four days before a young Indigenous girl must leave her family and go to residential school. Her mother, father and grandmother, each in turn, share valuable teachings that they want her to remember, while Shi-shi-etko carefully gathers her memories to remind her of home. After reading the book we then spent time honoring our own important memories and p

September    19-22nd I hope everyone is enjoying this wonderful start to Autumn and the gifts that this season brings to us. I would like to thank those families who were able to drop by our open house, it was so good to meet and connect with many of you and let your child shine and share their learning environment along with some of the projects we have been working on. If you were unable to attend on Friday and would like an opportunity to come in to the school or touch base with me, please email me.  This past week was another great one where we were packed with new experiences, building on our own sense of our identity as individuals and a group, as well as enjoyment.  Here is a glimpse into some of the components of this past week: I can decide to be active. I can understand the basic rules of games and fair play. I can show cooperation within small and large groups.  We were very fortunate to have had our soccer residency this past week. Students learned basic soccer skills along

September 12 -16th This was our first whole week together and I am very proud of everyone for their willingness to do their best, be kind and gentle to themselves and others and persevere through the longer days. You are all doing great friends! Here is an overview of our busy week!   This week we continued to work together as a classroom family to build our community norms and expectations and beliefs.  We've been looking at this through the lens of the Medicine Wheel and how we can achieve and maintain balance through our mind, spirit, body and heart. This important work will be a part of our holistic lifelong learning frame work which centers on wellbeing and mindfulness focus as we continue through the year.  I Can Understand the Relationship Between Letters (graphemes) and Sound (phonemes): As stated in the last blog - part of our literacy program is our work in phonics and understanding how letters can represent different sounds.  This week -group A students worked with the l

  September 6-9th Our second week of school together was a fantastic one filled with connection, discovery and smiles! This week we continued to build on our classroom beliefs and what it takes to be a community and a member of a community. After reading several books and examining real life scenarios we developed an understanding of what Respect looks like and sounds like in our learning environment.  Phonics is a part of our literacy program with emphasis on building letter and sound awareness as well as how to properly form the letters when printing. This week group A focussed on the letters s/a/t/ and by the end of the week were reading short words in the -at family such as at, sat. Group B's focus was on diagraphs at the beginning and end of words  - ng/th/sh. In math,  Grade 1's began our focus on number with  building their awareness of ways to represent numbers.  Here is an example of ways we can represent numbers: Grade 2 students dove into numbers through review of Fr

Welcome Grade 1 and 2 to our learning community (room 9)! I am very excited to welcome you to our class family and was so happy to connect with most of you and start to get to know all of you and your families. I am looking forward to building our on sense of belonging and community along with exploring and discovering new and amazing learning with all. Here are a couple of photos of our classroom - we will build on this space as we go and create a space that is ours.  The first day we explored a book titled, First Day Jitters  by Julie Danneburg. This book gave us a starting point to explore our emotions and to build on the understanding that emotions are natural and to develop emotional literacy. Students were given the opportunity to share how they were feeling about the first day of school as well as to contribute to building a class pictograph. The shared graphing task was a natural way to build in some counting, counting on and addition challenges.  We also used the book, Our Cla