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 through -

https://gfletchy.com/hen-house-building-fact-fluency-series/

We also continued to work on building fluency in addition and subtraction facts to 20. Students enjoyed engaging in finding Easter Eggs hidden around our classroom and solving addition/subtraction equations. 

Science - 
We also continued on our building things unit, where we focussed on how different shapes and types of materials affect our towers stability. 
Students dived into the challenge of building a tower with a minimum of 4 floors, using 2-3 different materials. They love to check the stability of their structures by performing a wind or earthquake test. 




We also had the opportunity to go out for a community walk this week. We were fortunate to experience and find evidence of spring along with our focus on finding living and non-living things. Students are becoming very mindful of their time out on the land and share gratitude and appreciation for these opportunities. 





















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