Student letters

Dear Parents,

Every Friday, you'll get a letter home from your child explaining some of their favourite things that happened in school this week. Some students will need help getting down even one word, but others will start with words or phrases. As the weeks progress, you'll hopefully see their letter formation and ability to sound out words improve. Reading this letter together is a good way to get your fingers on the pulse of their learning and what's happening in the classroom.

And I usually don't publish links to other articles, but this one was sent to me recently and I think it's quite useful. It outlines good practices for reading together with your child (an important thing to do daily). At the bottom, it also outlines some of the reading strategies we'll practice together as a class to begin figuring out what to do more independently when students come across words they don't know. This is especially helpful because it gets us both speaking the same language.

We'll be starting with Eagle Eye (looking at the whole word) and Lips the Fish (getting your mouth ready for the first sound) this week.

Here you go:

Reading homework tips for parents

Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan

Adventures in Grade 1

Dear Parents,

Today, we had a visit from a nurse from Sick Kids who explained about cancer and leukemia. She talked about how cancer cells can sometimes overwhelm other cells in the blood, that cancer isn't contagious, and went into some details about how our classmate's treatment. Students watched a short animated show from Charlie Brown about a girl named Janice who gets cancer and some of the challenges she faces, then had the opportunity to ask questions of the nurse.

A. had a question about how veins get to have blood in them, then J. immediately asked how babies were made (We deflected back to you guys), but F. let us know how mothers stop producing milk when their babies stop drinking it, in case we wanted to know and were too embarrassed to ask.

Happily, then it was recess.

On an unrelated front, students seem to be really enjoying our class read-aloud of George's Marvellous Medicine. I had to read two chapters today, because one was too short. Then, I saw this in the bathroom when I went out for dinner and thought it might remind students of some of the ingredients George included in his potion.

Every day is an adventure.

Sincerely, 

Ms. Goegan

Math Manipulatives in Action

Dear Parents,

It was a hot day in the classroom, but I feel like we started some real work today and wanted to show you what that looked like. 

Until I've had a chance to communicate with parents and get media releases, I'm doing my best to avoid face shots, except where I've had those conversations. At the beginning of a new year, I feel like it's good to be clear that I try to respect various family comfort levels about online privacy (For example, I never publish student names with their faces and configure this blog to be as low visibility as possible while remaining public). Please do let me know if I ever publish a photo you're uncomfortable with being on the blog. 

Below you see an example of an exercise that asks students about numbers relevant to them (their age, their birthday, the number of people in their family, how many pets they have, and how many students are in our class). 

I handed out a variety of manipulatives and asked students to show me those numbers in various ways. This is a simple exercise that lets students become more familiar with the materials in the classroom: 

Two sided counters and pumpkin seeds

Buttons, and checking each other's work

Marbles tend to roll, so are best in lids

Teddy bears

Cards

Jewels

Some students had an easier time than others (June 2 was a lot easier than December 29). Some students got excited and started to add all their numbers together. We consolidated our learning at the end of the lesson by talking over some tricks to counting bigger numbers, like 21, that don't fit on fingers

Here are the tips we talked about today:

--Holding the number in your head and counting up or down.

--Patterned counting by twos or fives.

--Using the manipulatives by moving them once they've been counted.

--Grouping the manipulatives to help patterned counting.

These are all simple ideas, but they are so useful when counting, representing, adding, and subtracting. You might even see the beginning glimmers of multiplication strategies in grouping the numbers. We'll keep working at this, but I'm happy that so many students seem excited by math concepts. 

Sincerely, 

Ms. Goegan

P.S. I'm totally bringing in popsicles tomorrow. 

Grade 1

Dear Parents,

As I begin to wrap my head around getting back to school, I'm just going to leave this link here in case you're interested in starting to do the same thing.

Helping your child succeed: Curriculum expectations for Grade 1

See you in September,

Ms. Goegan

The cat is out of the bag

Dear Parents,

The last day is always a blur, but all the facts are out there now:

I'll be teaching Grade 1 at IRC in September, Ms. Moniz will be teaching in Room 101, and you should have your class placements for September as well. I hope that you found report cards helpful in thinking about your child's learning.

I sent home a postcard (students chose their own image) with a little personalized note for each child on Tuesday, and Ms. Moniz sent home a little care package, with a math or language workbook and a bookmark, yesterday.

The last day is always a blur, especially while moving classrooms, so I did receive all your kind words and presents (homemade cards with kid notes are totally my favourite thing ever), but didn't have a chance to write personalized thank you notes in return.

Still, I hope it was a great last day for the kids: we spent a good chunk of our morning having a picnic with our reading buddies and the afternoon playing with building toys and reminiscing about our year together. The Earth Rangers assembly and our farm trip were highlights for students.

I hope you have a fantastic summer.
Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan

Translated into standard english: You're the best teacher ever. I learned a lot from you. You know you confuse me sometimes, but otherwise, you're great. I like you, Ms. Goegan and I still will always. 

Picnic Tomorrow and Assembly Friday

Dear Parents,

We look forward to welcoming you tomorrow for our picnic. If you are coming early to help set up, please arrive by 12:30 in the Kinder Yard. This should give us enough time to set up and get you good seats before the music presentation starts.

If you are bringing food, please make sure your containers are clearly labelled with last name and room number.

In the event of rain, we've decided it makes sense to have the entire event in the gym rather than asking you to take another day off work at the last minute. We hope you'll work with us to make this work, in case it's necessary.

We also hope to have enough helpers to make clean up a smooth process at the end of the day. Thanks in advance for helping us make this happen.

In addition, on Friday, there's a whole school assembly that should start at 9 am. If you're available to come early, meet us in the big yard for a special musical experience.

It's been a lovely year and a pleasure teaching all of your children (Some of them for two years!). Next year will be an adventure for us all in new classrooms, but I will be looking with interest to see how things continue to develop.

Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan

Field trip

Dear Parents,

This week Felix's mom has been in to teach us about clouds. You may have wondered about the white crepe paper many students came home with yesterday. Those were cirrus clouds, those pale streaky ones that travel high in the atmosphere.  We also learned about cumulus clouds, which are fluffy, and cumulo-nimbus clouds, which are definite signs of rain. We read a short story called Cloudette.

Cirrus clouds running around

Pretending to be cirrus clouds under a cloudless sky

Fluffy cumulus clouds gathering rain

Today was our field trip to Black Creek community farm. There were four different activities over the course of the day: A nature craft with found objects. A scavenger hunt where students made bracelets with beads representing the 5 things plants need and took home little sprouting seeds on strings around their necks. A chance to weigh and collect eggs, and commune with the farm's chickens. A hike through the local woods and a chance to wish on the Wishing Tree. I didn't take out my camera as much as I should have, but I hope to get some photos back from the other groups.

The homemade pizza and salad lunch was also delicious.

Thanks again to the Ah-Maz-Ing parent volunteers who came along and just had a great time with the kids.