Upcoming Dates / Reminders:
- We have a guest speaker, Michael Bortolotto, speaking to our school in grade groupings on Wednesday. Michael Bortolotto, is a successful professional speaker who lives with Cerebral Palsy. For the past twenty-two years people of all ages have been inspired, motivated, educated, and entertained by his "CAN DO" attitude. By using real life experiences and examples, he encourages and persuades his audience to rethink, what they may believe is impossible to realizing anything is possible by being determined, persistent, and focus on the end result.
- Vision and hearing testing is this week on Thursday and Friday. A letter went home about this a couple of weeks ago.
- Book exchange continues this week. Please return your books by Wednesday so they can be re-shelved. It is already nearing the end of January so we will send home our poem duotangs with our library books to enjoy over the weekend. Please return the duotangs with your library books next week.
- Read Around the Room this week on Friday, 8:40-9:00am and is also Lochside's Family Literacy Day. We want to make it a little different so students are invited to bring their flashlights, we'll draw the blinds, turn off the lights, and read by flashlight. Parents and grandparents welcome!
- Save the Date! We are heading to the museum by school bus on February 18th and need some parent volunteers to join us. You must have a criminal records check done for this trip, as you will be chaperoning 2-3 students in the museum. Permission slips will be going home in early February where you can indicate if you'd like to join us. This is an all day field trip.
- I had the privilege of attending the iOS Summit in Vancouver on the weekend, an iPad professional development event put on by the EdTech Team. I am excited to use iPad in the classroom to help support our learning. Today the class helped me document their discussion on the melting ice sculture. I have uploaded it in 2 parts on our twitter here. I was quite impressed with the knowledge the children shared with one another.
Classroom News:
Social Responsibility: We will finish up talking about the virtue COMPASSION. This week we will learn to show compassion by being helpful and by being considerate.
Literacy: This week we are adding the letters 'c' and 'k'. A new center opened up today where the children are invited to use the letters we've learned so far to create words. They can manipulate the letters and there are clipboards and paper ready for them to write down the words they have created. At the end of the week we will look at some poems we have been learning in class and will practice reading and tracking with our finger.
Numeracy: At the end of last week we started graphing. We learned how to ask a survey question and made several people graphs to show how people get to school, if they own a pet, or if they like to eat green peas. This week we will learn how to make concrete and picture graphs.
Science: Last week we looked at our big question is: How do animals survive in winter? After reading several books, we made a list of the animals, and chose one to draw. We made 5 groups of animals: 1) animals who hibernate, 2) animals who migrate, 3) animals who adapt, 4) animals who stay inside, and 5) animals which we are not sure. This week we will look closely at migration by reading more books, looking at pictures, and watching video clips.
Gym: This week we will on goal-kicking and learning the rules of soccer.
Computers: Today students returned to a website called 'Starfall.' You can check out the website here: http://www.starfall.com/ Students explored the ABCs today and also the first 1-2 lessons in 'Learn to Read.'