RamsayRowland

  April 24-28th  Our last week of April was a fantastic one! We were gifted with wonderful weather, amazing learning opportunities and wonderful connections.  I can learn about the needs of different living things. I can identify the lifecycle of different living things.  This week we had a wonderful field trip to the zoo where we were immersed in a program called On Gossamer Wings.  In this program students learned how these creatures use their senses to explore the world around them just like we do, compared their life cycles to our own and recognize the impact losing pollinators would be to the environment today. The rest of the day groups spent time, visiting the different species of living things at the zoo. It was a fabulous day where a great deal of learning and discoveries took place. The following day students were overjoyed when reflecting on the experience and how it influenced their mind, body, spirit and heart. A big thank you to our parent voluntee...

  April 17 - 21st We had a super week incorporating the themes of Living things into our inquiry work while focussing on our EGGS which are busy developing in their incubator. We focussed on some of our wonderings by examining our eggs, reading books and watching videos to find  answers to the following questions - What kind of eggs do we have? Why are eggs different colors, shapes and sizes? What do the eggs need to grow? As we continue on our inquiry students will be documenting our journey. The book, An Egg is Quiet by Diana Hutts Aston proved to be a wonderful provocation as it led us to see the beauty in eggs and their characteristics. Our next steps were to create a list of characteristics to describe eggs. Students then engaged in creating our own egg works of art complemented by word art.  Literacy- This week we learned about words ending in 'y' and when they make long e or long i sounds.  We learned that 'y' at the end of a single syllable word (ex. fly, sky...

April 11-14th It was another short week, but we packed in a whole bunch of fun, inquiry, discovery and time in the sunshine! Here is a little look into some of the things we were up to in room 9: EGGS!  We have 8 different colored, different size eggs making their home in our grade 1 classrooms for the next couple of weeks! We were very excited and surprised to find out about these eggs today. As a group we discussed the different animals and insects that we knew that came from eggs and then we each made a prediction of what we thought our eggs may grow into! We learned about an incubator which is an insulated enclosure that maintains heat and humidity which is important for growth and hatching of our eggs. We also began our focus on lifecycles. We can not wait to continue to learn about our eggs and share with you! Phonics -   This week we worked on the long /e/ sound. Students learned the silent/magic e tells the a to say its long sound/name in words such as eve, here, these...

April 3 - 6th Welcome to April! It was wonderful to be back with everyone this week and to get a chance to reconnect and hear about everyone's break.  Here are some of the things we explored this week- Phonics -   This week we worked on the long /u/ sound. Students learned the silent/magic e tells the a to say its long sound/name in words such as use, clue, cute  This week we focussed on the following high frequency words - my, than, first, water, been. Math -  This week we continued our focus on building resiliency, growth mindset and persistence through estimation tasks, number talks and brain teasers. Fostering on one's growth mindset allows students to build important life-long characteristics/attitudes and ways to navigate. These types of tasks are built into our daily math routines to allow children to work through productive struggle and to see that learning is supposed to be hard and to make our brains work.  Here is an example of a task we worked throug...