Play and presentations

Dear Parents,

Students have been so excited about their projects this past week, and it's contagious. As usual, there's lots of learning happening and lots of pictures to share, but I feel like I need to start by talking a little about the spirit of inquiry. First of all, I love that this student decided to make himself the sun, but I also love how excited he was about it and the ownership he took over the presentation as a result. My goal is always to see their personalities shining out of everything we do together and I just wanted to celebrate that off the top.

Science and Social Studies curriculums give us a lot of room for inquiry and personal engagement. It's so interesting to see students show us who they are through their work. I also find it fascinating to compare. Some students who were not so into our electricity unit were very engaged by looking at biology and vice versa for sure.

This week there was a lot going on with the Me to We bake sale and two assemblies (including a fantastic a capella performance by Cadence) but we managed to present all the animal projects. What I love is how different and amazing all of them were. The dioramas are on display in the hallway outside our classroom and I'd encourage you to look and see for yourself what a wide range of animals and styles of presentation we had. 

By and large, students took their presentations very seriously and we did our best to take photos during--although we missed one day's set entirely (oops). I was asking questions and evaluating, so our student teacher Ms. Vijan deserves the photography credit.

As with any project, the experience in doing is key and I'll be evaluating based mostly on students' ability to answer questions about their animal as well as how they did during the presentation. Look to see rubrics being returned early this week.

Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan

P.S. At the end of last week, students had the chance to play with their homemade snakes and ladder games. Here are some pictures of that as well:

Numeracy strategies

Dear Parents,

We're back in the thick of number sense and numeration and revisiting a lot of the strategies from first term with a little more depth and breadth.

First a couple of programming notes:

1.  A number of students were concerned about not having shoeboxes for their animal projects. Please let me know asap if this is actually the case and I'll try to support.

2. A number of parents had contacted me about summer school opportunities. Information regarding these went home today. If I missed connecting with you, please let me know and I'll pass the package along.

Our addition and subtraction unit started off with a bang on Monday when students were getting to know our new student teacher Ms. Vijan. 

They were very interested in her dog. One student asked the new student teacher how old her dog was. When she answered he was 8, the next get-to-know-her question was, "But how old is that in dog years?" (Priorities, right?)

Interestingly, one of our students got the correct answer intuitively, but couldn't explain how he'd gotten there. So we figured it out by modelling the number on the board with 8 groups of 7.  Another student insisted we'd counted wrong--the answer was 57, not 56! It was fascinating to see the wheels turn when I asked about whether a group of 8 would be an odd number.

The class is also going full tilt into reading comprehension for math word problems. In a recent PD I attended, word problem strategies were identified as an important area of need for students in our board.

Identifying number words and key phrases that signal addition and subtraction and modelling numbers by drawing circles to represent the number are helpful strategies that become even more important later--when the problems become more complex. We keep track of key information by underlining or highlighting it in the workbook, then drawing pictures to help count up.





The students are practicing using manipulatives (like counters or base ten blocks) to help make addition and subtraction concrete. They might also use also use counters or base ten blocks with a hundreds chart to help keep track of counting.



We're also back to the strategy of "Adding On". Students can use their fingers or counters to add or subtract once they have the first number as a starting point. This unlocks a lot of flexibility in how students can work with numbers because they don't have to have physical representations of both numbers. We practised adding up to 10 to some --really-- big numbers today and yesterday.

A hundreds chart can be useful to make sure you're not skipping numbers, especially when counting backwards. We talked about how the numbers don't change their order even when bigger numbers are in front (i.e. Counting backwards from 7299 is the same as 99, at least until we hit a round number)

Essentially, a hundreds chart is like a game of snakes and ladders (only upside down) so we got to work making our own snakes and ladders games to play in order to practice addition and subtraction.

Looking forward to playing this on Thursday when I return to the classroom. Tomorrow, I'm at a PD initiative planning a collaboration with a local dance artist. I'll post more about this when I have details, but I'm very much looking forward to it.

Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan

We are all made of star stuff. (Animal Projects revisited)

Dear Parents,

Some people found my division of the project confusing. My original intention was to chunk the writing, so that it could happen after March Break, but given the demands of different family timelines, I'll be sending home the written outline as soon as possible and letting it all happen at home. Many students hadn't started the project yet when we talked as a class on Monday--but with the March Break in the middle this timeline is likely to sneak up on you. Projects are due in their entirety on March 27th.

I would recommend getting the research and construction done pre-March Break if possible. 

I've also sent out a call for extra shoeboxes, but I haven't received any. (I may have a couple stowed in my own basement.) Please let me know via a note or email as soon as possible if you really need one. 

As we continue to investigate Living Things we've had a couple of really interesting Conversations and learned some interesting new words. For example, micturition, urine, and scat are all important parts of the life cycle. We talked about how farmers use manure to help plants grow and what happens to plants and animals after they die and return to the soil. It's amazing to think that the elements that make up our bodies are not new and have been around since the earth began. We are made of star stuff, indeed. 

Here's Carl Sagan saying that better:

Continuing on our science theme, today I brought out all my biology models and let students explore. Students were impressed when they could pull apart these 3D puzzles and see the layers that make up the human body. Here are some of the photos I took this morning: 

Model of human torso

This book has a 3D layered model in the middle and each page focuses on a different human system 

The placemat was being used as a reference for a couple different models including the skeleton and the muscle man

This is a single celled organism they're putting together.

The human heart

This student was looking at pictures of wolves, because that's the topic of her animal project

Another version of the heart 

Here's the complete torso

Wolf facts

A head with sensory organs and brains to put together 

Impressed with their work on the heart

I somehow missed getting pictures of either of the eyeball models or our transparent horse with all his visible systems, but you can ask your child about these as well. Many students cycled between several different models instead of silent reading this morning and had lots to say during our morning circle as a result. 

Sincerely, 

Ms. Goegan

Animal Research Project

Dear Parents,

I sent home a project package for an animal diorama project this evening. The project as a whole is due March 27th.

The dioramas are best made using shoe boxes, so if you have extra boxes lying around, we'd appreciate any extras being sent in. Please let me know if you need a shoe box.

Students have some access to computers at school, but using home time to help build research skills will be useful. We'll continue to fill in our K-W-L charts about the animals we've chosen at school and I have some templates to help format the reports at school in the week after March Break. Getting the research done early will be helpful to let us use class time to write.

In the photo below, you can see that we've begun to talk about the characteristics of different types of animals (vertebrates, mostly) and that the students who were here have chosen an animal to focus their research on.

Unfortunately, several students were away today, so I'll do my best to get the remaining packages out as soon as possible. I'm trying to get each student to pick a different animal and focus on a variety of habitats so we can learn more as a class. 

I promised to post some good websites for learning about animals. Here are some of my favourites, but which animals are included may vary:

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/ --Use the sidebar to help search

https://www.pebblego.com/ (free login for tdsb students is on the library sites card that went home in September) --This site will read aloud the text to students

https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/kids --links to pages about specific Canadian animals

http://kids.sandiegozoo.org/animals --Great photos and information, but a little less intuitive to navigate

http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/sciencefacts/animals.html --Good for cool facts about your animals, less good as a primary source

https://naturalhistory.si.edu/mna/main.cfm?lang=_en  --More advanced set-up, best viewed with an adult, but some interesting maps of habitats and specimen pictures

I'm anticipating that the acrostic and the vocabulary sheet parts of the project will be tricky, so I hope to demonstrate those a little more in depth as students begin to learn about their animals. If you have any questions, please do let me know.

Sincerely, 

Lisa Goegan

Dictionaries and Atlases

Dear Parents,

The past couple of weeks, I've been introducing students to new types of texts--atlases and dictionaries. In this world of Googlemaps and online dictionaries, it's important to remember that once these were things we looked up in books, mostly because some of the things that are intuitive about deciphering these kinds of resources to adults are the result of long hours of frustration using indexes and trying to find a word that's not spelled the way you think it should be.

So many types of texts have features that are unique. Students can better understand how to access these tools when they're taught them directly.

One of the science units in Grade One is Daily and Seasonal Changes. For this unit, it makes sense to me to dip toes in and out as we go through the daily and seasonal changes that make up the year: We track the weather and temperature daily in the classroom and our December field trip to High Park Nature Centre was a great way of getting students thinking about how changes in weather affect animals and how they adapt to their environments through the seasons.

For the rest, I've cribbed a bit from this page: www.mrcollinson.ca/DailyAndSeasonalChanges and seen where the conversation goes.

Students have been fascinated by talking about shadows and thinking about the rotation of the earth both on its axis and around the sun and a number of map related topics have come up, especially as students think about why Mexico and Cuba are so nice to visit from Canada at this time of year.


This book on Maps has been a long favourite in the classroom (Our copy is heavily taped).

I've also brought in some student atlases that include more features, like lines of latitude and longitude, for example. We spent some time looking at those today and I asked students what they noticed.

Today's letter of the day, with notes from student observations of Atlases

In this week's journals, students are drawing their own maps and incorporating some of the features we talked about during today's morning circle.

Thinking about dictionaries, one of our recurrent questions is "What do you do when you don't know what to do?" Some students always ask me to spell unfamiliar words for them--even though spelling isn't paramount to me, it is for some of them. Picture dictionaries seemed like a nice tool to help to address that. 

We talked about how a dictionary is organized alphabetically.



We discussed how not just the first letters go in alphabetical order, they all do--and there's a little box at the top to tell you what the first and last words on the page are.



These dictionaries also include a frequently used words index....


And thematic pages, in case you want to dive into a topic more deeply.




Interestingly, these dictionaries have been taken out quite a bit during quiet reading and Reading Buddies periods this week. We did some dictionary races on Friday that were a lot of fun as well as helping to build dexterity with different dictionary skills.






We'll be looking at non-fiction texts more closely in the next little while as we begin to research animals. Features like infographics, indexes, and tables of contents are not necessarily intuitive for beginning readers. We hope to unpack these some more in coming weeks.

Regards,

Ms. Goegan